Omni Channel Retail

Future of Omni Channel in Retail

by Sachin Kaushik,on Wed May 14,2019

As we stand on the cusp of the new year, and we think back on the year that is gone, we realize that the predicted future of Omni Channel Communication and retail apocalypse never came. While 2017 was all about the e-commerce boom in India, I strongly feel 2018 will be the year when brick-and-mortar emerges victorious, for after all, while the Internet may have penetrated the heart of India, the hearts of Indians (and their trust) still lies with the physical retailer. So, we foresee a union of offline and online in 2018.

There will be no such thing as online vs offline experience. There will be a single touch point, focusing on the consumer. Offline stores will become extensions of online businesses and vice versa, with traditional retailers tying up with bigger, horizontal players to extend their brand reach.

The Age of Technology

And then comes the biggest disrupter of them all for the year 2017 – consumer data and technology. These disruptions took retail towards a new phase of growth where consumer experience was the focal concern for all retailers and brands. The use of smartphones, apps, web, social media led to a boost in Omni channel communication retail and as a result, brands increased spend on digital marketing.

When we reflect back at retail in 2017, we see that a large part of the sector was dominated by new and exciting technologies like Virtual Reality, and Artificial Intelligence, and with good reason. The rise of AI will allow retailers to run targeted campaigns and market their products a lot more effectively using data analytics. Companies and brands will understand where their consumers will be and target them specifically through the channels that they are consuming.

Apart from this, robotics, drone deliveries, anti-fraud tools, bitcoin and block chain like technologies took the retail industry by storm.

Why there is a need for Omni Channel?

Today customers 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.

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.

Future of Omni Channel in Retail

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