All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.” ― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
“One view of the customer” is one of my favourite colloquialisms currently doing the rounds in omni-channel speak. I often use it myself, as it neatly encapsulates one of the current opportunities, as well as challenges, facing retailers today.
This wonderfully inspiring view is based on the theory that all retailers should be able to seamlessly, immediately, and accurately have one view of their customer at any given time across every single customer touch point – from social media interaction through to physical stores.
But is the practicality of this realistic? Or, is this a Peter Pan search for Neverland for some of our retailers?
Interestingly we all talk about it, but once again the insights is in the “how” to implement. Where do retailers begin to build this one view of the customer?
For many retailers the first level is based on having an integrated operating system. By having this it enables the retailer the ability to monitor transactions, collate consumer interactions, manage inventory, ledger interactions online and offline, and integrate social media. By doing this, the retailer is capturing a universal view of the customer across all channels, and this is exactly what retailers are now transitioning themselves to accommodate.
Our online sales provide a natural database for collecting customer information, yet in some recent client cases this was not mirrored in the stores’ POS systems and so retailers had different elements of business taking different views of the customer, and all the branding work, merchandise assortments, staff training etc was not going to change that.
Yet for many retailers the investment required to synthase the operating platforms is perceived as prohibitive and so we build the engine on spare parts and refinements of existing systems.
The topic of omni-channel retail is as much about the capital requirements to evolve the business platform as it is about the other aspects.
Considerations include:
• Multi-channel customer and transactional data collection across all brand touch points (web enabled)
• Merchandise warehouse- enabling capability to centrally buy
• POS capturing all forms of singular and aggregate data – producing scorecards etc
• Linked accounts and cash flow management
• Single integrated system – low reliance on interfaces.
Accordingly, we are all running at this target at very different speeds and with very different priorities and here lies the issue of fragmented customer experiences such that there are unfortunately many different views of the customer prevalent in many retail businesses at present.
To quote Nick Marfleet at Blocks Global in his insightful BRW interview recently: “Because retailers have built their different digital channels in isolation and in some cases reactively, they are not as seamless as they should be and require a lot of time and resources to manage.Most are also using a single message across all touch points rather than treating them as different channels that consumers use in different ways. Fragmentation between the channels is causing friction in consumer’s experiences”.
As we know, business is a combination of trading activities and funding activities and to build an operating platform and build all the system processors required to capture the data seamlessly simply isn’t cheap.
Sure there is a strong business case generally to deliver the ROIs although do you wonder, as I do, how does the small or medium size player really invest in this necessary new capture of that one view of the customer?
How do they invest in confidence so that their systems platform is contemporary integrated and able to capture this swirling “mash up of customer movement”?
In this race to adapt, is it that scale operators who have the financial resource to invest in the necessary gateways to create the seamless offer consumers expect?
We expect the less funded retailers will reach Neverland although over time and in an increasingly fragmented way.
How many views of the customer does your business have?
Happy Fit Retailing
Brian Walker