Become A Unified Retailer In 3 Steps

As leaders in the retail industry, we have seen first-hand the importance of creating a seamless and cohesive experience for customers across all channels. 

We aim to break down the friction between channels, develop a proper back-end to facilitate all of them, and integrate retail operations’ physical and digital aspects to provide a consistent and personalized customer experience. This idea is what we call Unified Retail.

Today, we have three areas you should focus on to develop your retail operations and officially become a Unified Retailer.

Make Five Channels, One.

The first step to becoming a unified retailer is to break down silos between channels. 

Why is your in-store, online, email, social media, and mobile channels working against each other? Unifying your channels is about making five of them, one. Make all your platforms your one version of the truth.

Retailers can achieve this by combining their point-of-sale, inventory management, and customer service platforms all together. 

Develop Customer Profiles.

After you have fused your channels, it’s time to develop a holistic view of the customer – a customer profile. 

This process involves collecting data from various sources, such as in-store purchases, online orders, and social media interactions, and using this data to create a single customer profile. 

Retailers can use these profiles to personalize the customer experience and offer targeted promotions and recommendations. Stop having an online basket and not letting it translate to your in-store purchase; it’s too much friction for the customer. Make sure to show all of the history of the buyer’s journey in their customer profile.

Implement New Technologies to Enhance the Customer Experience.

Finally, it all comes together. It’s time to embrace innovation and new technologies so you can achieve everything mentioned above. 

Adopt technologies to help improve the in-store customer experience and drive sales so your customer profiles and elevated back-end are appropriately used.

Improving scheduling, communication, real-time data collection, and pivoting tasks on the shop floor will help tailor the in-store customer experience. 

In this era of retail, technology solutions that are simple to deploy and easy to integrate will be the key to unlocking unified retail. Remember, your brand experience should be the same in-store and online to achieve first-class service.

by Melissa Cacador and Michael Foster