What Is True Omnichannel Retail Experience

Retailers often assume omnichannel shopping experience is limited to online purchases made on different digital touchpoints. However, as evidenced by the customer journey possibilities listed above, customers often visit physical stores during their purchase journey. Access to a mobile Point-of-Sale (PoS) system helps your staff support customers in making purchases how they wish. In addition, mobile kiosks extend the omnichannel shopping experience by allowing customers to place online orders at your physical store.

The omnichannel shopping experience, by definition, supports multiple purchase platforms simultaneously. Hence, a lot of disparate and real-time data is aggregated each time there is customer interaction. All this data must be stored in a central repository, and care must be taken to centralize customer data.

As multiple shopping channels interact to provide customers a seamless and frictionless shopping experience, it is essential to create systems that allow for real-time data sharing between channels and departments. A crucial part of this mix is to include central analytics, to derive insights that are relevant, contextualized, and targeted.

Channel strategy helps you determine effective routes for making shopping straightforward and frictionless for your customers. It helps provide customers with omnichannel experiences across communication channels that they prefer. The following steps help further:

Your branding, messaging, product offering and promotions, must be consistent across chosen channels.
Gain insight into your audience and draft messages that align with their shopping goals.
Access customer data and generate insights to understand what drives them to your brand.
Ensure functionalities are the same regardless of the chosen platform.
Choose relevant channels that are most effective with your target audience. Continue to measure your channel strategy and make changes based on performance and testing.

A defining characteristic of the omnichannel shopping experience is that it is hyper-personalized. Omnichannel shopping strategies depend on customer data to generate tailor-made responses, recommendations, and customer experience. This helps create a personalized customer journey so they feel they are genuinely being attended to.

Whether they contact the support center or browse products on your websites, everything is tailor-made to them based on different data sources ranging from previous interactions and user behavior to algorithmic predictions. This creates a cohesive purchase experience that enhances customer interaction.

Please note, it is essential to ensure that you store all customer data in compliance with various regulations such as GDPR. Thankfully, a retail tool solution will help ensure you comply with such data protection laws automatically.

A true omnichannel experience depends on evolving with emerging trends and technological developments. Here are a few considerations:

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have dramatically changed the way different touchpoints are operated, and it is essential to consistently iterate and innovate.
Identify key performance metrics (KPIs) to track and measure, and iterate to make improvements.
Conduct A/B testing to ensure that your omnichannel strategies are truly omnichannel and not just in terms of words.
Identify bottlenecks within the shopping journey and help make amends to your existing plan.

Most importantly, omnichannel is a philosophy not limited to making shopping seamless for customers. It also involves getting your team to immerse themselves in omnichannel philosophy and deliver a seamless experience to shoppers while making things easier for themselves.

A true omnichannel shopping experience recognizes that customers may not have access to all the touchpoints at all times. Businesses can make their products more accessible to discerning customers by understanding whether or not they use social media or other shopping platforms. This is particularly useful for B2B sellers whose customers may only be available on some platforms used by B2C customers. These include forums, closed networks, and customers who may not engage in mainstream omnichannel experiences.

Omnichannel shopping thrives on an integrated shopping process. It helps customers switch between platforms easily and make purchases quickly and seamlessly. However, you can also reduce integrations when needed to avoid complexities. This helps you deliver a minimally omnichannel shopping experience to customers who are picky.

Omnichannel provides a consistent shopping experience across platforms, making marketing messaging uniform. If you wish to silo your marketing campaigns according to platforms, true omnichannel shopping makes it possible. Every channel has its characteristics, and your branding can be altered according to the platform while retaining the essence.

The omnichannel shopping experience can pose certain risks, such as data loss or threat to privacy. Thankfully, true omnichannel shopping takes these risk factors into account and share only the necessary data between platforms. This helps keep certain sensitive data in silos, which can be retrieved or shared when necessary.

Omnichannel shopping enhances productivity of your work staff, and helps reduce a variety of expenses. This indirectly helps customers to pay less for their products, as you will be able to adjust your pricing accordingly. Saved time and money can be transformed into tangible benefits for customers such as discounts, loyalty coupons, and rewards.