Top 3 Practices For A Unified Retail Commerce Experience

Over the past three years, the retail landscape has been dramatically shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, macroeconomic challenges, geopolitical shifts, and climate change disruptions. Retailers are facing increased costs, narrowed margins, and tight labor markets, making customer experience (CX) and business agility essential competitive differentiators for resilience. To address these challenges, a Unified Retail Commerce (URC) strategy has emerged as the dominant approach, promising a cohesive customer experience across all touchpoints. However, implementing URC is no small feat, and it demands a clear understanding of its elements and strategic prioritization for successful execution. 

Understanding Unified Retail Commerce (URC) 

Unified commerce is the practice of connecting your backend systems with your customer-facing channels via a single platform. These platforms can interconnect systems of e-commerce, mobile commerce, customer relationship management and more to help provide insights into how to improve the customer experience.

URC relies on three core pillars to support the business: unifying the front- and back-end, prioritizing experience-led initiatives, and creating a composable business model capable of adapting to rapid changes. 

Top 3 Practices to Deliver a Unified Retail Commerce Experience 

To successfully implement URC and unify the front- and back-ends of organizations, retail CIOs should follow these three practices: 

Target the Four Key Front-End Customer Processes for Unified Experience 

• Browse: Create an immersive shopping experience that enables customers to find what they need, discover new products, and enhance their lifestyle through various channels like digital, mobile, social, and IoT-enabled devices. 
• Transact: Facilitate seamless transactions across channels, eliminating inconvenience and delays through modern interconnected point of sale (POS) and mobile applications. 
• Acquire: Offer customers flexible fulfillment options, such as in-store shopping, click and collect, automated replenishment, lockers, and partnerships with external organizations, for an efficient acquisition process. 
• Consume: Enhance customers' consumption experience with improved information and services, connected devices, auto-replenishment, and voice-enabled interactions. 

Use Customer Behavior Analysis for Customer-Centric Back-End Retailer Processes 

Understanding consumer buying behavior is critical for retailers to engage customers effectively. To achieve this, retailers should employ customer behavior analysis, a blend of qualitative and quantitative observations that illuminate how customers interact with the business. A comprehensive understanding of customer behavior during browsing, transactions, acquisitions, and consumption across all touchpoints is vital. 

Key steps include: 

• Prioritize a Customer-Centric Merchandising Approach: Align back-end merchandising functions, processes, and platforms with customer expectations, moving away from traditional product-centric structures to circular customer-centric strategies. Investment in analytical tools and business intelligence (BI) applications is essential for data-driven decision-making. 
• Establish a Customer Behavior Hierarchy: Categorize and analyze customer behavior patterns to optimize product offerings and engagement strategies. 
• Create an Algorithmic Merchandising Plan: Employ algorithms and data insights to personalize product recommendations, enabling tailored offerings that resonate with individual customers. 
• Prioritize Tech Investments for Cost Optimization and Risk Reduction: Invest in technologies that optimize costs and minimize risks in the URC strategy. 
• Connect Data and Analytics to Business Metrics: Align data analysis with overall business objectives to ensure data-driven decisions drive meaningful results. 

Improve Collaboration to Enable Real-Time Data Unification 

One of the most relevant elements to forming an effective URC strategy is having access to rich and accurate real-time data across the enterprise. To do so, retail CIOs should follow the following four steps.

• Reorganize Business Structure for Faster Data Sharing: Break down silos and encourage faster data sharing across the entire enterprise. 
• Improve Data Feeds into Automated Systems: Ensure that data feeds into automated systems accurately and efficiently. 
• Follow Best Practices for Identifying, Managing, and Protecting Master Data: Establish data governance to prevent data anomalies and ensure data accuracy across all channels. 
• Make clean inventory data visible for both enterprise and customers

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We hope this edition provides valuable insights into mastering Unified Retail Commerce for seamless customer experiences. Stay tuned for more updates and best practices to elevate your retail strategy! 

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