Cross-Channel: Key To New Customers, Buying Customers

Before the recession scared American shoppers away from the malls, consumer demand for consistent cross-channel shopping experiences was slowly forcing you to eliminate silos of customer and inventory data. Then the economy tanked, your customers went underground, and your merchandise became tough to budge. Those tough realities should be acting as a catalyst to speed up your integration of channel-specific customer intelligence and to furnish your customers with cross-channel inventory visibility. If you're not working on these initiatives in earnest right now, I question your priorities.

Cross-Channel Customer Intelligence
Priority number one should be gaining a holistic view of your customers, their shopping patterns, and their purchase histories across all the channels in which they engage you. This is difficult to do if you're treating each channel as an individual business unit — it calls for the integration of both systems and departments — but it's the position that most early multichannel retailers find themselves in today. Later adopters and new cross-channel retailers have the advantage of realizing the necessity of that integration up-front, or choosing software solutions designed specifically to bridge retail channels.

There are any number of ways to tie channel-specific customer intelligence together on the back end and even more approaches to using that information effectively across channels. And there are many vendors offering solutions that can be tailored to your way of doing business. As a starting point, check out some of the content in our Cross-Channel Resource Center at www.ismretail.com. Cross-channel integration will help you serve the shoppers who are already loyal to you, and more importantly, it will help you target and acquire new ones.

Cross-Channel Inventory Visibility
Part and parcel to serving cross-channel customers are cross-channel access to merchandise availability and order fulfillment. Don't make it a hassle for shoppers to find merchandise, wherever it lives in your enterprise. When they find it, make it easy for them to acquire it. Too often, the politics of geography and business division hamper cross-channel customer service. Eliminate these silos. Put kiosks in your stores, and give customers access to your entire inventory at the SKU level, in every back room and warehouse in the world. Let them know that you have exactly what they're looking for, somewhere, and that you're willing to help get it to them.

This month's issue includes a special report entitled Cross-Channel Retailing For The Anywhere, Anytime Consumer. In the report, RSR analyst Brian Kilcourse gives us a look at the cross-channel landscape and, more importantly, offers some specific advice on what steps to take now toward cross-channel success. See the RSR report by clicking here, or download a copy to your hard drive at www.ismretail.com .