The Web That Binds: Four Keys to Cross-Channel Engagement

There was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when the push toward the promise of multichannel commerce followed a logical and progressive set of steps. Align the inventory. Manage the merchandising. Consolidate the data. Birth multichannel. Or cross-channel, or whatever the CEO was calling it that day.

But then a funny thing happened. The consumer started to move faster, in patterns not yet predicted. He started to spend more time on the Internet than in front of the television. He became adept at traversing sites for different perspectives on products and brands. Working with friends on social networking sites and fellow shoppers on deal-sharing sites, he found views into brands that even the brands had not foreseen. Then he got a smartphone and took his newly honed shopping skills airborne. That little device became Robin to his Batman PC, a pint-sized tagalong that served as a point of reference and connectivity to all the research and shopping that had previously been left behind at the home or work computer.

And now, there it is, all the information of the Web channeled right onto his palm as he stands in a store. In one hand, the hangtag for a shirt. In the other, rich product information from the retailer’s Website, providing product details, imagery, suggested companion items.

Or maybe it’s not the retailer’s site. Maybe it’s an interloper, like Amazon’s SnapTell or eBay’s RedLaser, with a super-slick mobile app looking to hijack the relationship at the last second. Or maybe it’s not something as sinister after all. Maybe it’s just a tweet out to friends looking for the thumbs-up or thumbs-down on the purchase.

For most branded manufacturers and retailers, the new age of retail is awash with possibility. Here, price is not the determining factor as to who gets the purchase. Nor even is it geographic proximity to a physical store. No, here it’s the power of the brand, the quality of the engagement pre- and postsale, and the quality of the fulfillment whether in-store or by mail.

Branded retailers now have the opportunity to maximize the delights they offer consumers by providing eye-popping user experiences such as promotions unique to them and direct interactions previously too complex to manage. At the same time, they can also now minimize customer disappointments including the inability to complete a purchase due to out-of stocks, disjointed service qualities depending on the channel in which the good was purchased or returned, and merchandising strategies germane to the channel, not necessarily the consumer.

To serve this new consumer, brands are coming to view the Web the same way consumers view the Web: The Web is not a channel. It’s the glue that binds it all together.
 
Four keys to web engagement
For years, branded retailers and manufacturers carefully chose the precise experiences in which to invest to delight the consumer. And in many cases these experiences resulted in widespread consumer recognition for their efforts. Apple, for instance, has been praised for its in-store experience and mobile point-of-sale. Zappos is renowned for customer service. Nordstrom recently earned plaudits for its ability to always fulfill, on the Web, in the store, from another store, through its heavy investment in inventory management

What’s important to note, however, is that innovating to delight the consumer has not been for the faint of heart. There’s a heavy price of entry to be best in class for a particular experience, and the rewards are not always certain.  

Increasingly a new breed of branded retailers and manufacturers are breaking the mold, pursuing exceptional consumer experiences on multiple fronts. Enabled by new, light technologies, these retailers are bypassing the legacy infrastructure and instead going straight to the consumer with delivery models and practices that offer the ability to delight with faster, better deployment of technology. Fueled by today’s on-demand technologies, these retailers are following four core themes:

1) Unify the experience across merchandising, marketing and customer service. As consumers, we’ve all been there. You’ve received a gift and want to make a return. So you bring it into the store, only to find that the store needs to ship it to the warehouse for the warehouse to send you the refund. By mail. With an actual paper check. Due to poorly aligned systems, the store can’t access the promotions and pricing that applied to the original purchase, so the item needs to be sent to hither and yon for reconciliation and reimbursement.  

Leading retailers are taking a different tack. Their strategy is to align the various systems that support the consumer, namely ecommerce and all its merchandising, content, and promotions, with the core order systems. Most often, given the complexity and sophistication of online merchandising, this requires a very flexible order management system (OMS) that can accept the merchandising rules and data from the ecommerce platform. If the OMS is unable to accept these rules, collisions occur that directly affect the consumer; merchants must merchandise at the level of the OMS vs. at the level of what the consumers want and the ecommerce platform can deliver.

However, by fusing the systems for merchandising, sales, and service and aligning them on the same core information repositories for product, merchandising, and customer, leading retailers are building systems that can support the entire span of direct-to-consumer engagement, from presales merchandising to order-taking to postorder returns and appeasements, all operating on the same integrated consumer information and business processes.

2) Extend the experience to any device. It’s not about the channel; it’s about the devices and the applications that run on them. Some devices are deployed in the store, some of which are used by consumers (mobile phones, kiosks) and some by associates (point of sale, mobile point of sale). Some devices are in the contact center, where associates use them to assist the consumer. Some devices and applications are for branding only, with very limited shopping. Others are for expedited order-taking with transaction speed prized above look and feel.

And consumers use all of them.

There is no set array of devices and applications that every brand must have, but there is a universal rule: The data and the experience across these devices must be consistent and current. Always.

Legacy strategies for delivering this centered on point-to-point application integration, often across a wide array of applications and data repositories, to deliver the same consistent experience and information. Unfortunately, many of the systems were old and unable to deliver directly to the fast-moving consumer.

Today’s approach is different. Rather than rely on point-to-point integration, leading retailers are using open Web standards to connect the devices and applications. These devices and applications themselves are developed in a vast array of languages, but so long as they have Internet connectivity, they can call the core system for merchandising, sales, and service and serve to the consumer the same consistent information.

3) Differentiate the experience with innovation. From the consumer’s perspective the pace of innovation is exceptional. Seemingly every day, there’s a new experience to be had, a new app on the app store, a new experience that they never thought of before and now can’t live without. For retailers, the pace of change is exceptional as well. There’s a chance to delight with new applications, but with it comes the need to react quickly when the new-new thing goes viral.

For years, retailers have shouldered a disproportionate burden for innovation. Retail IT toiled to both support their current operating systems and deliver consumer-facing innovation. Yes, their application vendors provided new versions of their software, but the costs and complexities to upgrade to the new versions often placed innovation out of immediate reach.

Stealing a page from consumer technologies, today’s leading retailers are pursuing innovation through open collaboration with others. With newer technological foundations, retailers are positioning themselves to seize innovation faster and easier through collaboration from four major constituencies:

 * vendor partners. Through the automatic upgrades of today’s newer technologies, retailers automatically receive new innovation from their partners, without the costs, risks, and delays of traditional software upgrades.

* independent software vendors (ISVs). Newer on-demand technologies are enabling vendors to collaborate and preintegrate applications like never before. This in turn enables the retailer to adopt new applications faster without the traditional costs and weight of application integration.

* retail IT. By developing on open, on-demand platforms, retail IT professionals get the double benefit of not having to maintain core software and infrastructure (that’s provided by the vendor as a service) and developing in their preferred languages.

* open developers. Today’s leading on-demand technologies are opening the technology to all developers, not just client developers. These developers can then build application extensions and add-ons that retailers can easily adopt. Because in an on-demand world all clients operate on the same version of the technology, these developer apps are assured to integrate easily to all retailers.

4) Simplify delivering the experience with on-demand. Today’s retail CIOs are turning their attention to operating models that enable them to return value to the business faster and easier. Increasingly this means less time thinking about database upgrades and server performance and more time adopting best-in-class on-demand services for particular applications and functionality and focusing on how to make those services work best for the business and the consumer.
 
Jamus Driscoll is vice president of marketing for ecommerce solutions provider Demandware.