Walk A Mile In The Consumer's Shoes Before Building An Omni-Channel Strategy

By Jeremiah Shea, contributing writer

Omni-channel is an industry buzzword that many retailers are trying to understand, strategize, and execute on. At its most basic level, an omni-channel-type experience for a consumer is seamlessly shopping online or in-store with one company. That includes buying, returns, inventory visibility, delivery, and every other logistical element without a consumer feeling the difference. With the emergence of eBay and Amazon in the late ‘90s, online shopping became a generally accepted way of buying for most consumers. As those companies and others found success, the traditional brick and mortar adapted to keep up, but not with the long term vision that would ensure success. Instead of building from the ground up, most brick-and-mortar stores simply added it into their existing ecosystem and ran the online business separately. The two disparate systems are ultimately ineffective in dealing with consumers with omni-channel needs.

Retail Systems Research, a research company run by retailers for the retail industry, recently performed research on home delivery strategies and found in large that retailers are still paying too much attention to the competition instead of listening to their customers’ needs. The study cross-compared the top business challenges in home delivery operations and the consumers’ most desired home delivery benefits.

Upon looking at the consumer chart, the top two expectations are head and shoulders above all else. Those two needs are an increased speed of delivery and for brick-and-mortar retailers to offer home delivery in a cost effective way. Narrower delivery times come in third with some less obvious outliers making up the remaining requests.

From here, you would think it would be clear. The customer is always right, right? Well, as explained above, brick-and-mortar stores adapted into this delivery space instead of building their foundation on it and it’s possible that they’re still being distracted by the competition’s execution based on these results.

For the winners, you can clearly see an alignment between the challenges they’re prioritizing and what today’s omni-channel consumer expects. The challenges they focus on include speed of delivery, services like in-home delivery and installation, and shrinking delivery windows— which are today’s consumers top three requests. In stark contrast, the other biggest focus is doing more to compete against online entities and being more efficient and cost-effective with transportation and logistics. It’s only retailers’ third priority where crossover happens as in the desire to shrink delivery windows.

As - traditional retail stores continue to look for ways to capture back some of the share they lost to online entities, it would only behoove them to listen to customer needs, learn from the successes of the online delivery space, and leverage that into a more competitive offering locally. None of that is possible without a sound technological strategy, which is where VARs can step in and grab the reins.