Developing your Retail Omni-channel Roadmap in a Crisis

We’ve hit a turning point where technology is so prevalent and useful in the world of ecommerce and commerce where these two areas seem to have intersected seamlessly into everything that is omni-channel. So, there is no longer a disjoin of the phone or desktop or the store — it’s about all of these now, as one.

Digital transformation has evolved well beyond the hype and has become a strategic priority for many organisations. We see industry leaders massively embracing the digital transformation journey and trying to explore revolutionary ways that have the power to create new levels of productivity and new business models.

However, we are past the inflection point where digital transformation efforts shift from isolated initiatives to a strategic approach to digital innovation.

Across all industries organisations are striving to become “digital native”, however in the way these organisations that have embarked on a digital transformation journey still seem to be stuck in how they produce products and services, and how they bring these to the marketplace.  

The one major reason for this is, the lack of a digital roadmap that all key stakeholders can align with and drive across the organisation.

The reality is that it is very difficult to put in place a long-term roadmap for digital transformation due to the accelerated innovation cycles.

Retail organisations, in particular need to rethink how they approach the digital transformation journey and how they can start converting their strategic priorities into short-term, mid-term, and long-term digital retail strategies as part of a newly defined digital roadmap.

The buck stops with the business executives who need to tailor their digital journey to the overall enterprise strategy and design an execution plan to achieve their digital vision.

Retail customers are more digitally fluent and more digitally equipped than ever before, while their expectations are increasing at neck-breaking speed.

The retailers that don’t understand how consumers shop and what technologies are needed to satisfy these customer’s varying needs, will fade away very quickly.

Providing shopping experiences that are streamlined and convenient is a priority for the whole industry. In this fast changing environment, retailers will either need to replace or update legacy platforms and ‘stand-alone’ systems in order to achieve the necessary speed to support modern merged ecommerce and commerce and adapt to the services and products to the customers’ needs and expectations.

Physical retail is not over, yet. The industry has slowly overcome its fear that traditional commerce was going to be replaced in its entirety by ecommerce, as it realised that the main pillar of growth in future retail space would be developing a strategy to continuously deliver omni-experiences that blur the line between ecommerce and traditional ‘bricks-and-mortar’ channels.

The convergence between physical and digital commerce will require agile operations powered by an AI or machine learning layer that connects all customer touch points to cope with the ever-changing customer expectations in a timely manner.

However, too many organisations are building roadmaps rooted in the here and now, resulting in tactical plans that only achieve short-term goals. The challenge with this approach is that the roadmap is not sustainable for the potentially rough journey ahead.

I’m sure that several strategic priorities have surfaced on the boards’ agenda at many retail organisations who are quickly responding to some of the dynamics and strategic priorities that contain a collection of business objectives, use cases and processes to ensure consistency across overall digital missions of the business.

There are requirements for an agile approach to break digital efforts into use cases that are focused on measurable business outcomes and deliver immediate value to the organisation.

In order to scale, organisations need to think about the underlying relationship between use cases and the development of digital capabilities to support their strategic objectives.

Having a clear view of what the organisation strives to achieve helps identify which use case should be prioritised. Think about the roadmap and how it will evolve to accommodate changes as they develop and mature.

The strategic priorities of an organization need to be translated into one or more “future” digital-business use case that underpins its digital competitiveness.

This can be broken down into three or more steps, based on the individual organisations size and requirements;

Use cases in the ‘initial’ phase, Step1, represent initial capabilities that provide a foundation for the strategic priorities of an organisation where the roadmap consists of the use cases being deployed today with the underlying technology to support it.

The Step 2, phase of the roadmap should include the use cases and scenarios that are being nurtured and which are more advanced than Step 1. And when the ‘initial’ Step 1 has waned, the organisation is ahead of the curve, releasing it next strategic wave.

We then come to the ‘future’, Step 3 phase of the roadmap where use cases are beyond the possibilities of what we perceive today in retail. This is where the executives need an open mind from the ‘get-go’ to understand the true capabilities required to support  and best highlight the digital vision of the organisation and what they are trying to realise with these use cases.

By working backwards from Step 3, this will provide a relevant foundation of the required digital capabilities to the business and helps prioritise which use cases Step 1 and Step 2, should be realised now. With time and evolving innovation, the organisation’s priorities will change.

In this highly-wired world, there are massive opportunities to assist retailers in their roadmap strategy, with more access to a higher quantity and varying quality of customer data than ever before. Retailers can now construct process models to develop a deep understanding of customer journey, lifestyles and habits, leveraging real-time information to monetise powerful, personalised, and related experiences, providing a single view of the customer that translates into advanced targeting of messaging, experiences, and offerings.

The challenge is that ecommerce and traditional channels translate into various customer touch points that involve different areas of the business. Delivering world-class omni-channel experiences is critical, as only those retailers that provide contextual marketing practices with a view to delivering value to their customers will generate customer loyalty.

The aim should be to produce a balanced impact throughout the entire shopper life cycle which may be achieved by the retailer having an integrated CRM / CM system that unifies the management of all customer interactions in order to take full advantage of the entire shopper life cycle, digital and otherwise.

Enabling marketing efforts to build up fundamentals that mixes personalised promotions and orchestrated interactions with the objective of understanding the customer lifestyles and habits should be an overall enterprise strategy of retailers.

This customer satisfaction journey is a compilation of models that will enable the optimisation of retailers’ marketing efforts through:-

• Improved brand consistency across different channels.
• Understanding what customers really want. That is, retailers should analyse the expectations of their customers to gain a unified view of all customer touch points and focus on the most immediate needs.
• Understanding how the integration of physical and digital engagement channels affect the customer’s shopping patterns across these channels.
• Assessing customer engagement and satisfaction in real time to make informed decisions to provide a seamless omni-channel experience i.e. pricing, promotions etc.
• Contextual interactions/offers/communication, to reduce customer churn.
• Launching more precise marketing campaigns based on better customer insights to reduce marketing spend, improve cart to order conversion rate and increase customer satisfaction.
• Supporting the customer journey through multiple channels to increase revenue from cross-sell/upsell with the right offer at the right time.

The key for retailers is to develop a single view of the customer, where they can improve customer experience by generating processes that allow the implementation of a holistic customer engagement strategy that aligns to a consistent brand image.

Through a mix of targeted promotions, communications and social campaigns orchestrated through interactions, retailers need to be armed with promotional strategies and tactics so they can optimise the impact on customer lifetime value and return on merchandise investment –time-sensitive promotions aimed at a particular eco-system through a specific channel.

Your company can take advantage of the benefits of its size, such as being able to innovate quickly with greater agility and less bureaucracy, while also preparing to scale and expand into new markets with efficient processes, data insights, and intelligent technology. With a more accurate representation of delivery windows, the business can plan for safety, enable a quicker response to market trends and customer requirements and quickly blur the lines between online and offline worlds to support the organisations strategy for omni-channel orchestration and fulfilment.

The retail industry as we see it today, is going through huge transformation of the likes never seen before and the players that fail to invest in digital to generate continuous experiences that span both in-store and online will be unable to compete and will be forced to wither away.

Many efforts have been made by traditional retailers to reshape their existing systems in order to put in place the optimal structure to keep up with customer expectations and as the rush to embrace digital transformation to allow them to innovate at speed and scale increases, the bar is continuously being raised.

There is no one-size-fit-all, but small victories do win a war; reduce customer churn by proactively identifying customers at risk to churn and launch targeted retention strategies. Predictive analytics to minimise your overall inventory costs, predicting levels more accurately and supplying the right quantity of the right inventory to meet demand through better data insights into customer demands.

The organisation needs to have a clear vision in terms of what it is looking to achieve for its existing and future operations. The goal is to do all this without losing any of the aspects of your business to prevent it from evolving.

Knowing that over half of organizations get stuck on their digital transformation journey due to a lack of focus means that organisations struggle to step away from existing short-term goals or find it difficult to translate strategic priorities into wins.

It starts with converting strategic priorities into tactical plans and programs and identifying business models and processes that can deliver immediate value to the organisation, today.