By Freya Purnell
Digital has become a non-negotiable part of the shopping experience for consumers, who expect to begin and end their shopping experience in the digital domain, and to augment their in-store experiences with digital mobile.
According to ‘Omni-Channel 2014: Double Trouble’, the 2014 Benchmark Report by Retail Systems Research, sponsored by hybris software, an SAP company, 75 per cent of retailers surveyed believe that providing a consistent customer experience across all channels is very important.
Retailers believe that omni-channel fulfilment is now the top omni-channel opportunity, followed by improved operational execution across channels.
To execute on this omni-channel fulfilment strategy, 93 per cent of retailers say system-wide inventory visibility is the most valued capability, but only 45 per cent say they can enable that now, and fewer (39 per cent) are seeking to achieve this via system synchronisation across channels.
This year’s survey also showed a shift in what retailers had previously identified as the top organisational inhibitor to omni-channel.
Though in the previous two years, ‘one view of the customer’ was the top hurdle cited by retailers, this year they identified a lack of integration across channels for order management and inventory as the greatest inhibitor.
However, this shift does not mean that retailers have abandoned efforts to consolidate customer data across channels; on the contrary, they still very much see the need. Replacing legacy store systems with more modern technology is also seen as critical to achieve cross-channel synchronisation.
There is also a significant gap between what is regarded as valuable and actual use of technology – while 61 per cent of retailers stated both enterprise-wide customer visibility and inventory visibility was ‘very valuable’, only 32 per cent had adopted enterprise-wide customer visibility for longer than a year, and 37 per cent had used enterprise-wide inventory visibility over this period.
RSR’s research focuses on a category of retailers referred to as ‘Retail Winners’ – that is, retailers showing store/channel sales improvements with year on year growth of more than the industry average of 3.5 per cent.
