As time progressed, more avenues were added to interact and engage customers. These included telephones, emails, and catalogues. As of today, the list of channels has grown by leaps and bounds. Customers and retailers nowadays interact through the internet, smartphones, and televisions.
What is omnichannel retailing?
Basically, omnichannel retailing offers convenience and opportunities for interaction to maximise revenue and loyalty. Your enterprise improves customer shopping experience and dabbles with retail transactions through retail stores, websites, telephones, emails, smart phones, and applications.
Omnichannel Retailing Features
- Maintaining Standards
Making a first great impression should be the primary objective whilst adopting an omnichannel approach. But that’s not all. In order to increase your brand’s popularity, you must ensure that quality standards are maintained across all platforms. You can start by ensuring that your staff, deployed across all channels, complies with your customer service standards. Delivery and service charges along with return policies must also be standardised across all avenues.
- Communicating Information
A customer mustn’t feel the need to divert to other webpages or applications to derive information about the products sold by your business for an Omnichannel . Your enterprise must ensure that all stages— browsing, research, buying, sale services, return policies—of a purchase are well established for a satisfying customer experience.
- Reaching Out
Omnichannel retail gives you the power to extend your operations within and beyond a nation. And this spread can be realised without splurging a lot of money. Websites and applications can be developed with local content and currencies for little or no investment so that your brand gains popularity.
- Price Tags
Since your business will be operating through multiple platforms, the final say in pricing commodities rests with you. Products can have the same or varying prices depending on the platform a consumer chooses to use.
A good example to explain this would be the lower pricing for a particular commodity on a website compared to a store. By varying your prices, customers also get the freedom to choose between discounts and personalised treatment.
- Understanding Likes And Dislikes
Omnichannel retail aggregates a customer’s reviews, likes, dislikes, preferences, clicks, and browsing history in order to formulate personalised results. This makes the life of a consumer easy as relevant suggestions are automatically displayed, negating the need for research. As a result, your business also maximises its revenue. Intelligence Node ace in data collection and analysing customer behaviour. This data is collected with their retail analytics software that can be conveniently integrated into your website or smartphone application.
Benefits of Omnichannel Retail
Omnichannel retailing is one of the major reasons why online businesses are getting increasingly competitive and out-performing one another. Well, it boils down to benefits that are up for grabs.
- Efficient Employees
Technology plays a great role in transforming your retail business. But at the end of the day, technology is created by humans, and operated by them. Omnichannel retailing empowers individuals; it’s not just the customer who learns about multiple platforms, but also your employees who get hands-on experience of using technology to captivate consumers.
- Versatility Breeds Success
Nowadays people prefer shopping from the comfort of their homes, rather than stepping out in search of a store. If your business has adopted omnichannel retailing, it shows how it’s keeping up with technology and this is what consumers want to see businesses do. And you’re rewarded with customer loyalty in the end.
However, integrating multiple channel will only be the first step in turning around your fortunes with omnichannel retail. In time, the same platforms start improving as a result of customer feedback. And these improvements—such as pricing and personalised offers—reel in new customers and retain the existing lot. As a result, your sales and revenue increase for the convenience and services your business offers.
What other channels are added to market businesses remain to be seen. But whatever the medium, be it physical or virtual, businesses will continue to benefit from omnichannel retailing for years to come.
Omnichannel or multichannel retailing is a marketing policy that offers multiple ways to consumers who long for a commodity purchase. The basic, and probably the first channel were stores. As a customer, you’d scan the store and its products, select one, scrutinise the pros and cons, and eventually buy it.
