Multi-Channel Retailing: It's All About Ease

By Jason Jacobs, CEO CORESense

Retail is constantly evolving into an increasingly personal experience for shoppers and an increasingly competitive arena for retailers. Customer expectations and demands are high – they are looking for more information, more personalized service and an exceptional shopping experience. Retailers, particularly in a struggling economy, can ill-afford to provide anything but what is expected.

Retailers need to understand who their customers are and what products they are buying, no matter how they come to them - through the web, phone sales or their brick-and-mortar store. And customers not only want the convenience of buying wherever and whenever they choose, they also expect to be recognized no matter what channel they use. For example, if a customer purchases a product online, they want to be able to return it to their local store or buy online and pick it up in the store. It shouldn't matter which channel they came from – customers are valuable, pure and simple.

While multi-channel retailing has become quite common – brick-and-mortar stores opening online channels, and vice versa, sales through catalog and phone, etc. - many "multi-channel" retailers have built their businesses on single-channel platforms that do not integrate well with their other retail management systems and retailers are feeling the pain of trying to manage their operations, their systems, their inventory and their valuable customer data. Unfortunately, single channel systems make it very difficult to provide the kind of knowledge of the customer that allows a retailer to create the personalized, targeted marketing campaigns that are essential to effectively market their products and grow sales and the cross-channel experience that customers expect.