There are many terms to describe retail management systems these days. And while they are used interchangeably, there is a difference between ‘omnichannel’ and ‘unified commerce’. Unified commerce is the next progression of what’s come before and simplifies the technology you need to give customers a consistent omnichannel shopping experience.
Omnichannel offers options, and limitations
With an omnichannel approach, you give customers the ability to shop in-store, online, via your app, over the phone, etc.
But there’s a good chance these systems rely on out-of-date information and old or closed integration technology. Which means you might be connecting new channels to systems that aren’t updated in real time. And you could be duplicating data and finding that interoperability with each new technology is difficult, expensive and slow.
As a result, many seemingly omnichannel experiences are held together with manual processes and complex integration. You end up with silos across your business which negatively impact your customer because they have to deal with information gaps, fewer fulfilment options, or having to start new conversations in each channel.
For example, an omnichannel setup might enable data sharing between physical and online stores, but the contact centre is left out. So if a customer has a question about something they like online, they call your contact centre and your rep can’t see the customer’s recent online purchasing history or whether the customer’s nearest store has the item available for collection.
Internally, staff must duplicate tasks because there’s no single version of data that everyone shares. This day-to-day inefficiency means teams have less time to spend on innovation and giving customers the personalised experiences they expect.
Unified commerce simplifies consistent customer experience
Natalie Berg of NBK Retail says we no longer ‘go’ shopping, we just ‘are’ shopping. The only way to give consumers this seamlessness is to move beyond omnichannel to unified commerce.
Unified commerce is a platform. It centralises your customer and inventory data for one version of truth and its open architecture (using APIs) exposes that data to all your channels.
With this single view of your data, you can move stock, update prices, add loyalty program rewards – whatever you like – across all your channels. The data stays in sync and transactions can be viewed in near real time. So customers get a ‘one brand’ experience: one person with one account, interacting with one unified brand. No hitches, no inconsistencies.
From a business perspective, unified commerce resolves issues inherent with traditional channel integration, and offers many more benefits:
More accurate information for decision making
Reduced inventory holdings and increased availability
Optimised supply chain and order management
More payment and fulfilment options
Efficient processes and less manual overhead
Faster innovation and speed to get new products and services to market
See how unified commerce solves many more of omnichannel’s limitations and how it can set you up to create the retail future you want. Download Unified Commerce is the Future of Retail now.
