On a weekend afternoon, you wanted to go for apparel shopping knowing the fact that you were running late for a friend’s reunion. Whether to go for offline and online purchases is the big hurdle. While you could check previous customers’ reviews online and get the items delivered to your place, you also wanted to check how a new shirt would look and feel before buying.
At last, you reached a local store and added some of the items in your shopping basket with the help of a trusted salesperson. You also found that some of the shirts you liked on the online store were not available offline. Since the queue to checkout was so long, you almost want to break it to pay first. Lastly, you had no other option but to be patient while standing in the queue, wondering if the digital payment mode could be available to save time.
Many customers experience such situations. Now, what if the store was empowered with QR codes or POS machines? What if you could place an order through the app and pay online while choosing to pick up the items offline? You could have reached the reunion timely and enjoyed it more with your friends.
Does this sound familiar to your multi-channel business? Can this happen to your customers as well?
The retail industry in India has changed rapidly with the rise of e-commerce and shifted more towards omnichannel retail. When it comes to providing the best customer experience, omnichannel retailing is the need of the hour for most enterprises. It allows buyers to engage across various channels, thus driving sales and reinforcing customer loyalty.
With new technology and ways to do business popping up over time, evaluating the right options and ensuring you do not commit common mistakes is no small endeavour. Also, when customer expectations change constantly, the right approach may seem like a moving target.
Carving an effective omnichannel retail strategy is no easy feat. It needs you to perform periodic analysis, maintain coordination between channels, and deliver a fulfilling customer experience. If a brand does not have the resources or expertise to implement an omnichannel strategy, the customers are more likely to feel frustrated than ever.
To help you stay on the right track, we have compiled a list of mistakes you should avoid while setting your business up for omnichannel retailing:
Disconnected Online and Offline Retail Channels
Many businesses face a tough time integrating data from multiple channels or touchpoints to deliver a seamless customer experience. In fact, data management across channels is one of the major challenges of implementing an omnichannel strategy.
For example, missing out on sales due to stockouts results from a lack of proper central visibility of inventory. This requires automated sharing of data between sales channels to prevent the risk of losing customers because of out-of-stock inventory.
A study by Harvard Business Review also found that around 73% of consumers prefer buying products through multiple channels. Google also confirmed on the similar line of thought that 85% of online consumers begin their purchase journey on one device and finish it on the other.
The inability to connect the dots can prevent your business from creating a personalized experience for your customers.
Improper Utilization of Customer Data
In most cases, buyers leave behind a trail of data including their contact information, search history, and previous orders when they interact with different brands. However, a majority of this data becomes outdated over time. For example, if a buyer previously wanted to look for only low-priced items in your online store, the chances are that he now wants to spend more on big-ticket items because of higher income.
The lack of proper utilization of customer data before it becomes obsolete often makes a dent in the omnichannel retail sphere. This can be tackled by having a 360-degree view of your existing and potential customers and identifying valuable data to be taken into use for both sales and marketing needs.
No Action on New Retail Findings
Analyzing customer data to find insights for your brand’s omnichannel strategy is half the job done. It’s not the end of the task when you want to grow an omnichannel brand catering to diverse sets of audiences. The actionable part comes after you have analyzed your customers’ needs.
Consider this example –
You run an online store selling Indian sweets and delicacies. Over time, you realized that many of your customers want to place an order online but have asked for in-store pickups and payments. Knowing that there is a demand for such customer service, not doing anything about it won’t make any positive difference or improvement in the customer journey.
Even global data states the same trend and says that more than 50% of merchants experience a knowledge gap to understand the value of cross-channel retail capabilities.
Interesting Read: What Does Omnichannel Retail Mean for Customers?
Wrong KPI Selection for Retail Performance Analysis
In general, a buyer passes through four different stages in his journey with a brand – Awareness, engagement, conversion, and delight.
One of the common omnichannel retail mistakes that many businesses make is that they work on ensuring and measuring only the overall effectiveness of their omnichannel strategy. Failing to measure different KPIs at different stages of a buyer’s journey often prevents them from deriving meaningful data about each stage based on which improvements can be made.
For instance, the number of unique visitors on your website or app can be considered a KPI for the awareness stage, while the duration of each visit can be tracked during the engagement stage.
Non-Unified Customer Engagement on Different Channels
Most retail customers want their hands on the products at their convenience, time, and will. It may happen that the in-store customers find certain items out of stock but the same is available in the brand’s online store. Also, if one channel is not synced to the other, it will be quite challenging for a brand to offer personalized product recommendations.
Giving one channel higher priority over the others in omnichannel retail is a big mistake you should avoid as it can lead to loss of sales and loyal customers. The unification of your online and offline platforms is nearly essential to provide an all-inclusive buying experience.
Failing to Align Marketing Strategies with Omnichannel Offerings
In general, there is a lot of overlap between the marketing strategies and omnichannel retail initiatives. For different types of marketing campaigns, the underlying channels must be well-linked together to promote transparency and customer satisfaction. If they are not, the customer experience will ultimately be affected.
Assuming a customer comes into your store and says –
“I want to benefit from the current discount of 10% on using my credit card for purchases. Is it available only on your online store or in store as well?”
Ideally, your omnichannel retail strategy should make it easy for the customer to benefit from various marketing campaigns, irrespective of the channel chosen by a customer.
Not Making Every Channel Shoppable with the Right Payment Option
Digital payment is indeed the new oil that omnichannel retailers use to drive their growth vehicle. There is a plethora of online payment tools available in the market to make payment acceptance easier. Restricting your brand to use only a few of them while there is no such constraint on others does not make sense.
If your online store has a payment gateway integrated to accept payments, your offline retail outlet can also have a QR code, POS machine, and payment link facility to make it easier for the buyers to pay you digitally.
Interesting Read: Why Does Your Brand Need an Omnichannel Strategy in 2023?
Ideally, you need to select a payment solution provider that offers a comprehensive suite of payment products to support your omnichannel retail strategy. This will also benefit you in the form of easy payment tracking from multiple sources at one place and streamlined account reconciliation.
FAQs
Is it quite difficult to connect both online and offline retail channels?
Integrating multiple channels or touchpoints for an omnichannel customer experience comes with the responsibility to manage data around stocks, sales, orders, payments, etc. This is possible when you use tools that automate data sharing and synchronizations. For instance, you can use Paytm for Business’ payment solutions to accept payments via QR code, payment gateway, or payment links and have the unified data visible through one dashboard.
How to measure an omnichannel strategy effectively?
The right measurement of the effectiveness of an omnichannel strategy requires selecting different KPIs for different stages at which a consumer is on his journey to buy from you. For example, you can track unique visitors on your app or website to get a fair idea of the customers in the awareness stage. These are the customers who are exploring your offerings and may choose to buy from you.
Is it possible to make every retail channel shoppable?
In simple words, making each retail channel shoppable requires two things – availability of products in stock and a wide range of payment options to buy from you. For the former side, you need to manage the inventory. While for the latter, you need a comprehensive payment solution provider that supports a wide range of highly preferred payment options.
