Omnichannel has come of age. Retailers are constantly challenged to ensure seamless and consistent customer experience across channels. Happiest Minds’ survey, targeted at executive leadership members of tier 1 and tier 2 US based retailers, aims to provide an insight in the maturity of today’s Omnichannel initiatives. The report covers the attributes that form the backbone of Omnichannel success and the strategic priorities of retailers over next 3 years.
“We are in the midst of a perfect storm of Omnichannel, with in-store transformation, analytics driven personalization, data and infra security and executive leadership commitment forming the bedrock of change. The holy grail for retailers continues to remain the same – to ensure true continuity of consistent and delightful customer experience,” says Salil Godika, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Happiest Minds.
Below are some key findings from the omnichannel retail survey report:
- 64% of retailers are putting an Omnichannel strategy in place and there seems to be a widespread acknowledgement of Omnichannel as a key strategy lever. Additionally, 38% of retailers enable their customers to engage with their brands across stores, kiosks, the web, mobile, social and call center. The place where retailers need to step up is in certain foundational capabilities – like single view of customer, products and inventory, which is crucial to delivering a connected and context-aware experience.
- Personalization is becoming a differentiating factor for retailers in their goal to reimagine customer experiences. 60% of respondents have initiated analytics and big data programs to shape their personalization strategy.
- Stores continue to be the primary channel for majority of the respondents. Over 60% of retailers have embarked on transforming in-store customer and associate engagement with connected experiences and capabilities. Stores are driving the change today and are on their way to becoming mini-fulfilment hubs.
- As customers switch from channel to channel, continuous security and compliance is a must to manage risk, protect data and comply with regulations. Nearly 75% of retailers are investing in threat management, vulnerability and data security solutions and tightening their internal identity and access management solutions.
Finally, the report draws our attention to one key area that retailers seriously need to rethink that Omnichannel transformation has to be driven from the top down and management buy-in is an absolute must, for its realization at ground level.
You can access the full report here – http://www.happiestminds.com/retail.
