You’d be a richer retailer!
And better profits are yours when you go multi-channel retailing. Multi-channel retailing unleashes your business to sell to more people, more often. You start making new, more loyal customers from those who live just around the corner or right across the globe.

And whilst some customers will continue to use just one channel to buy from you – those that start using more channels will become amazing customers – with greater loyalty on bigger purchases, made more often. That’s a multiplier effect that can make you rich!

The Multi-Channel Retail Experience
Nobody said multi-channel retailing would be easy. Customer management, for instance, becomes far more complex in a multi-channel environment. Yet, customer management offers one of the few remaining windows of opportunity for retailers competing against the dominant retail giants.

The need for customer management has never been greater than in the multi-channel retailing environment. Today the customer experience is fragmented. Prices, inventory, promotions and policies often differ between channels. Yet, customers want a seamless shopping experience across all channels. They want to order products online but return them to the store. They want to browse products in the store, yet order online, from a kiosk or a catalog. They want prices, return policies and promotions to be consistent across all channels. Providing this level of service requires effective customer management of the highest order.

There is no realistic alternative to a strategy based on excellent customer management. Most retailers cannot maintain a low price strategy over the long term against today’s category giants. Similarly, few retailers can match the sheer breadth of inventory of the large-box stores. Rather, only superior customer management offers a sustainable way to compete and win in today’s multi-channel environment. According to The AMR Research Retail Insider: IT Spending Profile, by Scott Langdoc, published on May 10, 2006, “All retail segments see customer order management as the most strategically important initiative.”

Complicating matters and increasing the cost is the difficulty of achieving operational efficiency across multiple channels. Policies, processes and systems must be synchronized for the multi-channel environment. This requires integration of systems and easy access to and exchange of information among channels. It means rationalizing business processes to deliver a seamless shopping experience across all channels. Furthermore, consumers bring high expectations to today's shopping experience.

It's well known that customers have little tolerance for out-of-stocks and slow checkout. Given what little loyalty most shoppers have today, one bad experience sends that customer and their wallet to a store across the street. Realizing this, a majority of top retail IT investments are positioned to improve the overall interaction between customer and retailer." In short, multi-channel retail success is all about customer management.

Leveraging Systems to Meet the Multi-Channel Challenge
To deliver the kind of superior shopping experience customers demand, retailers will need to provide seamless integrated service across all channels. This requires the retailer to optimize its systems for the multi-channel environment by:

Extending existing retail systems across all channels — retailers can no longer afford to maintain different systems for different channels. They must extend and integrate the existing store systems for customer and order management, inventory and fulfillment to all channels.

Synchronizing operations and processes — customers must experience consistent policies and processes. They must be able to special order merchandise, specify delivery or return products the same way, whether they are interacting with the retailer online, through a catalog or in the store.

Coordinating supply chain with fulfillment — retailers must manage the supply chain to ensure the vendors are meeting the service and delivery levels specified for each channel, whether the need is for replenishment or drop shipment.

Certainly the typical retail systems widely used today - commercial packaged applications, piecemeal Web applications, and custom-developed homegrown applications - cannot do it. They are costly to extend across channels and difficult to integrate. Built specifically for individual channels, they cannot easily be managed and synchronized to provide a seamless multi-channel shopping experience. In short, they leave too many gaps in capabilities, thereby hindering the profitable pursuit of the multi-channel retail opportunity. Instead, “technology investments that highlight speed of checkout, self-service, multiple sales channels, inventory availability, and personalized content are what will engage your customers and help you compete better,” according to the August 18, 2003 AMR Research Outlook, 2004 IT Initiatives in Retail: The Priorities Are Emerging.

To do this, retailers need to integrate appropriate multi-channel customer order management and inventory control within the existing retail system infrastructure. “Retailers recognize that efficient checkout and expanded customer interactivity through more targeted offers require a new technology framework that supports not only traditional POS, but online and catalog channels as well,” adds AMR Research in the Retail Insider: IT Spending Profile, . Such a system must also support flexible process configurability.

Achieve Profitable Multi-Channel Customer Satisfaction
The current retail system solutions are insufficient to meet the challenges of today’s multi-channel environment. Typically intended for a single channel, they do only part of the job, forcing retailers to deploy, integrate and maintain multiple systems, which is a costly undertaking. More importantly, the resulting systems do not allow the retailer to excel at customer management and deliver a superior shopping experience. This shortcoming can have dire consequences as retailers attempt to differentiate themselves from the dominant category leaders. Retail success requires superior customer order fulfillment and inventory management. To achieve this and sustain it as a competitive advantage, retailers need to provide a seamless multi channel shopping experience. They need systems to coordinate order management across all channels and effectively orchestrate the supply chain. Only when they do this, can they support the kind of retail innovation required to consistently satisfy the customer and be profitable in the process.

“We believe that retailers have no more than 18 months to get customer management right before Wal-Mart attacks this activity in the same vigor that it has attacked and won supply chain efficiency.” Scott Langdoc. The AMR Research Outlook. June 18, 2006.

Multi-channel retailing is being rapidly adopted around the globe by the leading retailers. It drastically increases the value of your business, and allows you to start selling beyond your traditional store front or points of sale. Multi-channel retailing is about expanding your business!