Are You Giving Your Customers What They Want?

"The Customer Is King!" is an age-old mantra that still rings true today. But, what satisfied yesterday's customer is no longer enough. Customers demand visibility into their orders as well as flawless fulfillment. They want to find, configure, and order products and services through all available touch-points. Also, they want to monitor order status through various channels, regardless of the channel used to place the order. In fact, a survey of 5,000 consumers found that 90% want to track the status of their order and subsequent shipment. In a follow-up survey of 100 retailers by Multi-Channel Merchant and Sterling Commerce, only a handful offer that option. Retailers without existing cross-channel execution plans will soon be left behind.

So what can you do? You can change how you do business in a few ways. Consider outsourcing and leveraging third-party logistics providers (3PLs). Also, you can implement new fulfillment strategies, such as "endless aisles." Or, you can implement technology for a competitive advantage. For example, order management technology can help companies gain a competitive advantage through two advanced capabilities — a contextual view of the order- and process-centric order brokering. A contextual unified view of the order provides all of the order information even if it comes from disparate systems. Process-centric order brokering allows retailers to view demand across the entire supply and demand chain compared to what is available internally and externally. Together, these capabilities enable retailers to give the customer what they want when they want it.

Order management technology enables retailers to expand their product assortments to meet customer demand for more choices, without expanding the overhead to carry them. For example, retailers setting up "endless aisle" programs may not execute the fulfillment process, but they must still manage with complete visibility in order to respond quickly to consumer demand. A contextual unified view of the order provides that visibility by aggregating global inventory into a central repository. As a result, customers get the product choices they want, greater visibility into product availability, and the ability to track order status in real time.

Satisfy Customers With Unique Returns Process
Order management technology provides flexibility in how processes are set up to put the customer first. Take the returns process as an example. By providing a seamless, fluid returns process, organizations can elevate customer satisfaction. Most organizations have a unique returns process. Taking a process-centric approach is critical to ensuring that the process can be customized for the organization's unique needs. This process also improves operational efficiency by eliminating costly manual processes.
With the advent of ready access to information for order status, consumers have an increasing demand for accurate, complete, and up-to-date information for all orders. Proactive event management and alert notification are capabilities that help companies communicate proactively with customers. These capabilities notify companies when an exception occurs during the business process flow. To resolve issues, a unified view of the order provides customer service associates with the ability to modify or reconfigure existing orders, determine the status of an order, check inventory, or manage returns.

Retailers are finding they must have complete control over fulfillment and logistics and manage all steps of the order life cycle as a single unified process. A key strategy to achieve these objectives is to implement order management technology that will enable retailers to keep the customer king while improving operational efficiency.