OMNICHANNEL DEFINITION
The goal of omnichannel is to provide the customer with a seamless shopping experience – whether the customer is shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone or in a bricks-and-mortar store.
Successful omnichannel retailing is giving the customer a choice as to how they shop, when they shop and where they shop.
Omnichannel retailing provides a seamless experience to the customer, which is no longer a linear process.
Retailers need to organize their supply chains to manage multiple channels and a complicated path to purchase.
Whether the channel is the web, the store, or on a mobile device, the supply chain is the key to delivering a customer experience.
With an omnichannel supply chain, you ensure your product is at the right place at the right time for the customer to be able to purchase.
OMNICHANNEL CHALLENGES
Achieving a successful omnichannel retail experience is not without its challenges.
Retailers’ intensifying attempts to become omnichannel have started to blur the boundaries between online and physical retailing,
However, according a recent study, while large retailers are working towards this goal, their progress remains modest
The biggest obstacle standing in the way of an organization’s customer experience was a lack of integrated information systems.
REAL LIFE PROBLEMS
Many companies are at the breaking point, because their hardware and software are ancient, and the hardware is beginning to fail. Often the software is such an old version that it will not run on new hardware. Companies in this situation have to upgrade everything at once.
This “crisis” is also an “opportunity” to jump to an omnichannel solution and move ahead of larger companies, who can’t be as nimble.
What is needed is a solution that will integrate a POS system, financials, manufacturing, order processing, our orders flowing in from the web.
Often old systems won’t talk to each other and that means a painful amount of double work. Want to add a new product? You have to set it up in both systems. And if you want a a sales report, you have to take the retail sales out of one system and the e-commerce sales out of the other, and manually combine them in a spreadsheet. If you want to do that for 2,000 SKUs, you’ve got a lot of work.
An integrated system is a huge time-saver. Having all that automated allows staff to do more higher value-added stuff that probably hasn’t been done in the past, just because there was so much manual work.