To execute the perfect customer order, your order management solution must deliver what customers now expect – the omnichannel experience of buy anywhere, fulfill anywhere and return anywhere. Otherwise, they’ll quickly find somewhere else where they can get that experience.
Delivering the perfect order also means getting customers the right products delivered at the best price, when and where they want. For merchants, this means doing so at the optimal cost and efficiency. One way to accomplish this is by deploying a single, centralized order management solution to enable the perfect order.
Such a centralized solution provides many benefits to a business, but the most significant advantages are the benefits to customers. During their shopping journey, customers traverse online and offline channels before making a purchase. Most visit a physical store before buying online, and most customers who purchase in store have already visited the website. For the anytime-anywhere experience they demand, a single, cross-channel view of orders gives them up-to-date information regardless of the touchpoint – website, mobile, in-store or a customer service center.
Merchants can also use interaction and order data to continually engage customers with personalized communications, promotions and offers. Catering to every customer interaction increases brand loyalty, conversion rates and the likelihood of repeat purchases.
A centralized solution also enables seamless order orchestration. Customers get their choice of fulfillment options including buy online, pick up in store, buy in store, ship to home, drop shipment direct from vendors and split shipments from different locations. This also ensures customers receive all parts of their order on time regardless of the fulfillment and delivery methods. If fulfillment exceptions do happen, you can resolve them quickly.
Exceptions will always be part of the order management process, but that doesn’t mean they must always require manual and time-consuming attention. A centralized solution with intelligence can automatically handle most order exceptions from all your fulfillment locations so your business can scale while headcount remains fixed. If the system is still unsuccessful, fulfillment managers are automatically notified of an unfulfilled order. When an exception does occur, recovering quickly avoids customer disappointment.
Finally, a centralized solution must integrate with other key systems such as ecommerce, point of sale (POS), financials, inventory management and warehouse management systems. With seamless connections across the business, you can increase order velocity and reduce cycle times, getting products to customers quicker and with less overhead.
As a result, costly and often error-prone manual processes for maintaining the order lifecycle go away, allowing you to channel those resources to meet customer expectations with relevant, omnichannel shopping experiences that grow revenue. All the while, operations are streamlined in the face of rising order costs and the multitude of fulfillment options that customers expect.
A single, centralized order management system establishes the backbone of delivering great customer experiences that extend across your supply chain to final delivery and beyond. Seamless omnichannel customer experiences delivered profitably are the very definition of the perfect order.
Allison Manetakis is Director of Commerce Product Management for Oracle’s NetSuite Global Business Unit