The future of retailing – OmniChannel experience

Customers today buy from brands and not from channels. It is this phenomenon that brings in the concept of customer centricity into the picture.

Customer’s needs and wants are always evolving. However, instead of identifying a different solution for every possible scenario, businesses should rethink about customer engagement and how they can provide a seamless experience by unifying offline-online channels.

In this article you’ll get to know what is Omni Channel and why do you need it.

What is Omni Channel?

Customers today want to have complete control over their buying decisions. They want to purchase products whenever they want, wherever they want, that too with their own methods that suit best to them. Omni Channel retailing helps businesses in enabling this seamless experience for its customers.

Omni Channel retail is a modern approach to commerce that focuses on designing a cohesive user experience for customers at every touch point. This differs from a traditional approach, where individual channels were optimized without necessarily taking the whole experience in mind.

Hubspot defines Omni Channel as: “the ability to deliver a seamless and consistent experience across channels while factoring in the different devices that consumers are using to interact with your business”.

Why there is a need for Omni Channel model?

A study was published in the Harvard Business Review in 2017 which clearly states that Omni Channel really works. The study was conducted on the shopping behavior of around 46,000 customers who made a purchase during the period from June 2015 to August 2016. Of the study, 7% were online only shoppers, 20% were offline and the rest 73% used multiple channels. The following results came out of the analysis:-

• Retailer’s Omni Channel customers spent an average of 4% more on every shopping occasion in the store and 10% more than online than single-channel customers.
• Customers who used 4+ channels spent 9% more in the store, on average, when compared to one channel.
• Conducting prior online research on the retailer’s own site or sites of other retailers led to 13% greater in-store spending among Omni Channel shoppers.
• After an Omni Channel shopping experience, these customers had logged 23% more repeat shopping trips to the retailer’s stores. 

Another survey report by Aberdeen group conducted on 80 retail enterprises in 2011 led to the below findings:

Omni-channel picks up where multichannel falls short

• Serve the Customers where they are – In order to build a sustainable business, you need to serve the customer better wherever they are to build loyalty and have better conversion rates.

• Gaining more customer insights – the unified system of Omni Channel customer engagement makes it a lot easier to assemble all the data in one place and generate actionable insights from them.

• Engage with the customer in real-time – The unified system helps you keep a higher conversion rate by engaging with the customers on multiple channels in real time. One such application would be the use case of Close the Sale, where the sales associate can look at the availability of an item at all the stores of the business and book the product then and there for the customer.

At this point, we hope that you have got a clear understanding of What Omni Channel is and why it is important.

To know how we help brands and retailers enable a seamless shopping experience through Omni Channel retailing, make a direct business enquiry.