If now’s the time to create the ‘buy anywhere, fulfil anywhere’ experiences your customers expect, our four-stage maturity model will help drive your roadmap.

It helps retail leaders assess current capabilities, identify gaps, define a strategy and prioritise areas for improvement.

Many retailers are still figuring out the best approach for implementing and gaining value from their CX investments. Most are currently in the first phase of the maturity model, with only a handful in the innovation phase.

The path to a unified CX has four stages:

A single, accurate and up-to-date view of inventory is the first step in your unified commerce journey. With unified inventory management across every physical location, you can make better decisions about what stock to order and how to make it available in your sales channels.

Start by consolidating your inventory from all locations onto one platform. With real-time data on stock levels, you can guarantee you’ve got the right inventory available in each location, without carrying the cost of overstocking or ‘buffers’. You can optimise your product range by matching stock to each store’s location, community and demographics while still giving access to your complete range via endless aisle. You can also react to trends quickly, and forecast demand based on historical data, sales forecasts and seasonal variations.

The benefits

With a single and accurate view of all your inventory across all locations, you’ll increase the amount of inventory for sale while reducing inventory cost.

Once your inventory is under control, you’re free to increase your purchasing, ordering and fulfilment options to provide customers with frictionless experiences and access to your entire range from any location. To do that, you’ll need to move from multichannel silos to a unified commerce platform that provides a strong order management capability.

Exposing, rather than replicating, inventory and customer data from your platform to each and every channel means everything stays in sync. It gives you a stable hub for all your channels – reducing integration, complexity and overheads while increasing efficiency and accuracy. 

The benefits

You can make purchasing online and in-stores more seamless and convenient through endless aisle, digital payments and ‘buy anywhere, fulfil anywhere’ services, such as click-and-collect, store-to-door and returns anywhere. Your staff and customers will have consistent product visibility and can expect fluid and accurate interactions, whether in-store, on mobile or online.

Now you can build genuinely meaningful customer experiences. With a single view of customer, order and inventory data, you can treat each customer as an individual, all the time – one person with one account, interacting with one unified brand.

Make your loyalty programme your cornerstone for innovation, delivering the unified and personalised experiences customers expect. Use AI and data from online and offline channels to deliver timely and personalised communications, recommendations, offers and rewards across in-store and digital touchpoints, including desktop web, mobile web, mobile apps, email and social.

The benefits

By delivering each customer a powerful, tailored, one-of-a-kind experience across all channels and touchpoints, you’ll create rich emotional connections, drive up conversions and send transaction values soaring.

Your unified commerce platform is now your hub for innovation - a springboard for adding new channels and services to take advantage of new capabilities and deliver results at a speed and scale that would be unachievable within a traditional omnichannel model.

With agile methodologies and APIs to easily plug-in third-party apps and systems, you’ll reduce integration and maintenance overheads, increase real-time accuracy and enjoy virtually limitless scalability and agility. And by seamlessly embedding purchasing opportunities into everyday activities you’ll make the shopping experience seamless for the consumer.

The benefits

No longer limited by technology, you’re free to create buying opportunities that are lightning-fast and free from unnecessary friction. The end result is extraordinary customer experiences that help to capture market opportunities, generate additional revenue and build a disruptive competitive advantage.