Tag: omni-channel retail software

Leverage the Power of Omni Channel Retail Software: Strategies for Seamless Customer Experiences

Posted on by Omprasad Devadiga

With the rise of technology, omni channel retail software has become an invaluable tool for retailers. This powerful software enables businesses to integrate their various sales channels such as online stores, physical stores, and mobile apps into a single unified platform. In today’s highly competitive retail landscape, delivering seamless customer experiences across multiple channels is crucial for business success. In this blog, let’s look at the strategies to leverage the power of omni channel retail software and enhance customer experiences.

Understand Your Customers’ Journey:

To provide seamless experiences, it is vital to understand your customers’ journey across different channels. Omni channel retail software allows you to gather and analyze data from various touchpoints, providing valuable insights into customer preferences and behaviour. Comprehending how customers interact with your brand allows you to personalize their experiences and tailor your marketing efforts accordingly.

Integrate Inventory Management:

One of the key advantages of omni channel retail software is the ability to synchronize inventory across all channels. This integration ensures accurate stock levels, preventing a customer from placing an order only to find out that the item is out of stock. With real-time inventory visibility, you can offer customers the possibility to buy online and pick up in-store or vice versa and endless aisle, improving convenience and reducing the chances of lost sales.

Provide Consistent Product Information:

Consistency in product information is essential for building trust and providing exceptional customer experiences. With omni-channel retail software, you can maintain a centralized product catalogue, ensuring that all channels display accurate and up-to-date information. Whether a customer is browsing your website, or mobile app, or visiting a physical store, they should have access to consistent details about your products, such as descriptions, pricing, and availability.

Enable Cross-Channel Communication:

Omni-channel retail software enables seamless communication between different channels, allowing customers to switch between them without disruption. For instance, a customer can start an interaction on your website and continue it through a live chat on your mobile app. This cross-channel communication ensures that customers receive consistent and timely support, enhancing their overall experience with your brand.

Personalize Customer Experiences:

Personalization is a powerful tool for creating memorable customer experiences. Omni-channel retail software can track customer preferences and purchase history, enabling you to offer personalized recommendations and promotions. By leveraging this data, you can tailor marketing campaigns to specific customer segments and deliver relevant content across all channels. Personalization enhances the customer experience, increases customer loyalty, and drives sales.

Implement a Unified Loyalty Program:

An effective loyalty program can significantly impact customer retention and engagement. With omni-channel retail software, you can implement a unified loyalty program that rewards customers regardless of the channel they choose to shop from. This integration allows customers to earn and redeem points seamlessly, encouraging repeat purchases and fostering brand loyalty.

Embrace Mobile Technology:

Mobile devices have become an essential part of customers’ shopping journeys. Omni-channel retail software provides mobile-friendly features such as mobile apps, mobile-responsive websites, and mobile payment options. By embracing mobile technology, you can engage customers on their preferred devices, offering a convenient and streamlined shopping experience.

Conclusion:

In today’s omni-channel retail landscape, leveraging the power of omni-channel retail software is vital for delivering seamless customer experiences. By understanding your customers’ journey, integrating inventory management, providing consistent product information, enabling cross-channel communication, personalizing customer experiences, implementing a unified loyalty program, and embracing mobile technology, you can create a cohesive and exceptional shopping experience that drives customer satisfaction, loyalty, and business growth.

Embrace the power of ETP omni-channel retail software and stay ahead in the competitive retail industry.

Top 5 Compelling Reasons Why You Need Omni-Channel Retail

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Top 5 Compelling Reasons Why You Need Omni-Channel Retail

 

The concept of omnichannel retailing has now taken over a majority of the retail industry, with retailers focussing on providing a consistent, coordinated omnichannel customer experience across all customer channels using consistent and universal data.

So, what is omnichannel retail?

Omnichannel retail involves a dramatic shift from the multichannel retail approach. This retail strategy refers to a business model wherein all existing channels are integrated to offer customers a seamless and omnichannel shopping experience. The strategy is empowered by centralised data management, which blurs the lines between online and physical channels.

Customers can seamlessly use different channels in their shopping processes and are given a unique opportunity to create their preferable shopping routines. The omnichannel retail approach is adopted simultaneously in inventory management, sales channel, and marketing strategy.

This article aims to help retailers understand the need of investing in omnichannel retail: 

1.Offering A Wonderful Customer Experience

Omnichannel retailing results in an omnichannel customer experience that seamlessly integrates online and offline channels. A retailer’s ultimate goal should not be to generate sales in a specific channel but to allow purchases to occur naturally and conveniently in the channel chosen by their customers.

By integrating online and offline channels, customers can shop from anywhere and experience an optimized retail experience. Be it shopping in brick and mortar stores or via using apps or company websites, customers can interact on all channels, efficiently manage their loyalty points and rewards, and invest in quick transactions. This type of interaction at all levels helps in improving customer relationships and pushes them to interact on a deeper level with retail brands.

2.Improving Sales

With an omnichannel retailing set-up, shoppers can shop from whichever channel they like, physical stores or online channels. With inventory management integration in the retail strategy, retailers receive stock visibility across all channels and gain accessibility into the customer’s favorite channel. This retail strategy also integrates multiple sales channels, and shoppers can pick the most convenient one, thereby leading to an increase in sales.

3.Increased Customer Retention Rates

Shoppers aim to buy products in a way that is most convenient to them. An omnichannel retail strategy is the best way of offering your customers various sales channels and letting them pick one that best suits them. Further, omnichannel retail incorporates multiple payment gateways that ease transaction processes. This leads to optimized checkout rates and quick and secure checkouts, resulting in increased customer retention.

4.Improved Data Collection

With an intelligent omnichannel retail solution, retailers can store all customer data centrally located on cloud databases. The valuable data may include essential customer information like contact details, purchase histories, etc. Retailers can take advantage of this data for creating personalized shopping experiences for customers. They can monitor customers across all channels, understand them better, know their preferences, and create targeted marketing campaigns and customized promotions for every client that makes them feel special.

5.Enhanced Productivity

The omnichannel retail experience offers a 360-degree view of all the customer purchases that helps to serve them better in the future. The integration of loyalty management programs further increases productivity.

Customers can pick, review information, offer feedback, purchase, promote, and like products from anywhere that increasing overall productivity and efficiency.

ETP’s omnichannel retail software offers an amazing omnichannel retailing experience

An intelligent omnichannel retail software integrates all crucial retail operations such as the point-of-sale, inventory management, customer relationship management, etc. by providing a single point solution for all retail processes irrespective of the channel. It perfectly integrates the backend operations with the demand and supply channels, offering physical and digital retail personalization to the customers which improves their overall experience and visibility of the brand.

 

The Omni-channel Transformation of Retail Businesses at ETP #Futuretail, Malaysia

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ETP Group, Asia’s leading Omni-channel Retail Software company hosted senior representatives from Malaysia’s leading retail organizations to discuss future challenges and opportunities in an ever-changing retail landscape. The key discussion, “The Omni-channel Transformation of Retail Businesses in Malaysia”, was led by team ETP, including Mr. Naresh Ahuja, Chairman and CEO, Mr. Raj Jagasia, Executive Director, Mr. Pranay Pujara, Consulting Manager – Projects and Mr. Danny Foong, Business Development Manager.

The discussion was part of the ETP #Futuretail 2019 event held at the Sheraton Imperial Kuala Lumpur Hotel, recently. Mr. Danny Foong welcomed the ETP #Futuretail guests and Mr. Raj Jagasia shared an overview of ETP’s growing presence in Asia. Mr. Naresh Ahuja then shared insights on the growth of the Malaysian retail industry in the context of Asia Pacific and the transition of traditional retail to modern retail, e-commerce and omni channel retail.

Mr. Raj Jagasia, Executive Director ETP

Mr. Raj Jagasia, Executive Director, ETP Group initiated the discussions with an introduction to ETP.

Mr. Naresh Ahuja, ETP Group,

Mr. Naresh Ahuja, Chairman & CEO, ETP Group then shared insights on the performance of retail, e-commerce and omni-channel in Southeast Asia.

Pranay Pujara, ETP Group

Mr. Pranay Pujara, Consulting Manager – Products, ETP Group presented a live demonstration of ETP’s Omni-channel Retail Solutions to establish how ETP can help retailers in Malaysia to overcome the challenges in omni-channel retailing.

Following the live demonstration a panel discussion was held with eminent industry experts. The panel shared their thoughts and opinions about the changes in the buying behavior of Malaysian consumers over the last 3 years, the value of the brand in the mind of the modern day consumers and whether the internet has commoditized brands. The panel exchanged their views on the future of malls and stores in the 3 to 5 years. They also discussed about the digital transformation of retail taking place in Asia in the next 2 to 3 years and whether it will leapfrog the US like the Asian mobile technology did. They highlighted the 3 priorities that retailers should focus on to handle the change in consumer behavior.

ETP will continue to drive the omni-channel transformation of retail businesses across Asia-Pacific, India and the Middle-East.

3 Important Differentiators for Retail Brands to Stay Ahead of the Competition

Posted on by Omprasad Devadiga

etp-blog-3-important-differentiators-for-retail-brands-to-stay-ahead-of-the-competition-163

The retail markets across the globe are becoming increasingly competitive for 2 major reasons. On the one hand technology has disrupted the industry in multiple ways and on the other hand customers shopping behaviors have changed dramatically. Additionally, both these factors are influencing each other to further pose more challenges and create opportunities for retail businesses. In this intensely competitive scenario, retail brands need to differentiate themselves so that they emerge winners.

Below are 3 important factors that can help retail brands differentiate themselves:

Supply chain –

Simply put, getting the customer what they want and where they want it is a serious concerns for most retailers as the complexity of processes and operations increase with the different channels and random ways the customer goes about shopping and ordering products. New omni-channel fulfillment options such as click and collect or BOPIS, endless aisles, reserve online and pick-up in-store, and a few other combinations have emerged over the last couple of years. Moreover, same day delivery, drone delivery, collection from preferred location, anywhere returns, and so on, have also come to the fore lately. Offering these fulfillment options requires retailers to have a solid supply chain system that can reduce the chances of stock-outs, damages and other potential risks. Thus it is important for retailers to focus on the supply chain and use technology to optimize it so that there is a smooth flow of the product from manufacturing to the consumer.

Customer relationship –

As stated earlier, technology has influenced the shopper. Customers today are more informed and demanding than about a decade ago. In addition to that, they are spoilt for choice thanks to the variety in products, different channels of shopping, payment methods and accessibility to information. The customers are on the driving seats and retail brands need to be ready to fulfill the demands of the customer on their terms. This will be possible only if companies keep their customers at the focal point in the business. They will have to build deep and long lasting relationships with the customer and take appropriate efforts to understand and know their customers’ preferences. Using technology to capture and analyze customer related data and with proper customer segmentation and profiling, retailers will be able to design and create tailored offerings to the customers in terms of products and related services.

Marketing and branding –

It is a no brainer that if retailers are not able to get their marketing right, they won’t be able to click. Retail companies are pumping in huge investments and efforts into their marketing and branding strategies and execution. But with so much noise around it is difficult to get noticed. In order to stand out, retail brands must adopt for a unity in diversity approach. Firstly have uniform branding and messaging, secondly identify platforms where their customers are most likely to be and thirdly promoting the brand message across these platforms will help retailers reach the desired audience with higher chance of conversions. Taking this to the next level by designing and creating offers and promotions that are hyper personalized, localized and unique will have customers wanting for more. As customer attention spans are small, retailers need to get their act together and render the maximum impact in a short time.

Also Read: What Retailers Need To Understand About The Omni-Channel Customer Experience

How Click-and-collect can help boost your retail business (video)

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Omni channel retailing enables retail brands to expand their presence as it removes the dependence on a single channel and allows the use of multiple channels to interact with their customers as well as sell products. ‘Click-and-collect’ or ‘Buy online pick up in store (BOPIS)’ is a powerful omni-channel fulfillment option that is gaining popularity, globally. The below video illuminates some of its important benefits.

ETP Omni-channel Retail Software Solutions provide you with features such as ‘Click and collect’ enabling you to deliver a unified brand-customer relationship across all channels.

What makes luxury retail a challenging business?

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Etp-blog-What-makes-luxury-retail-a-challenging-business

Luxury products have always been one of the most admired and sought after products. So much so, that consumers of such products take pride in their possessions and are often considered to be of a higher class. They and their products are the ‘talk of the town’ most of the times in social gatherings and people like to be associated with such class conscious, brand loving and luxury seeking consumers. Luxury products therefore had few options and demanded a high cost of purchase deliberately tailored to a select set of consumers.

But now times have changed thanks to rapidly changing consumer mindsets and the very idea of “luxury” is evolving. The old-fashioned ideas that defined luxury as aspiration, high status, exclusive, wealthy, don’t really paint the exact picture of what customers perceive about luxury products. One of the drastic changes over the recent years is that the new age luxury isn’t for showoff.  Similarly other values that luxury brands exclusively attributed to, such as better quality and style, precise workmanship and great designs, are not exclusive any more to luxury.

Consumers’ tastes are evolving. There is an indisputable appeal for new products and services along with more choice of options yet having the flavor of uniqueness and exclusivity. This has given rise a various breeds of brands such as specialised ones and those that are highly customised to customer demands, thus increasing competition.

Further, along with changing tastes, customer shopping patterns and buying behaviour have undergone a tremendous transformation. Traditionally, luxury shoppers heavily relied on physical retail to fulfil their desire for luxury goods. But now, multiple channels have come into the game and customers willingly switch between channels to get what they want. Seamless demand fulfilment across channels necessitates the reduction of various issues such as decrease in quality or other losses that are caused during the course of the supply chain. While older shoppers are still playing a significant role in the luxury market spends, millennial’s and Gen Zs are predicted to account for the larger growth in the coming years. Moreover, their new spending habits which are faster, more frequent, brand-conscious and trend-driven while being highly influenced by digital platforms.

All these are the modern day challenges that luxury retail businesses, especially the ones still depending heavily on the heritage and traditional processes are facing and there is one way out. They need to transform their retail businesses to omni-channel and employ the right omni-channel retail software to exceed their customer expectations and fulfil their business goals.

Also Read: How Can Retail Leverage The Benefits Of Blockchain

Finally! A Retail revival, but for whom?

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Etp-blog-naresh-ahuja
Two years ago I wrote about the struggles of the retail industry in my article “Retail is dead! Long live Retail”, it’s nice to see some of the predictions in this article come true! Time to reflect and see what’s next.

The US retail market, the bellwether of the industry, has finally started growing again. Retail sales are surging, up 6.4% YOY from last year this July. Store closures are down 22%.

The growth is being led by Retailers who are getting the consumer back, bringing e-commerce like service to their customers, with click and collect and curb-side pickups, concierge services, frictionless returns, store to home deliveries, and many other services. While physical retail is back, e-commerce continues to grow, interestingly a major part of this digital growth is being driven by retail giants like Walmart.

At the same time, we are seeing a number of brands and retailers heading down the slippery slope. Some of them household names. The market is clearly being divided into those who will make it and those who will not. These retailers have closed unprofitable stores, cut costs, reduced manpower, rejigged their pricing and merchandise, yet they are not able to make it out of the downward spiral. So what is the reason? Since we work with retailers across 22 countries and see some of our customers and friends in both categories, we can clearly see the difference in their approach. Some retailers see technology investments and related service costs as a necessary evil, they do not see them as strategic tools to help them win this wave of transformation both in the industry and the minds of consumers. These are the retailers who are endangered, though they can still turn around if they change their mindsets.

On the other had there are a number of retailers who are quietly embarking on large internal projects to change the way they work with consumers and the service levels they provide, transforming their technology and online presence, bringing Omni-channel and self-service initiatives to the table and using smart ways to price right and brand right and promote the right products to the right consumers. They have brought in change in their existing teams and brought on board a number of new retail experts, worked closely and deeply with technology and supply chain partners, malls and banks to bring about the transformation that’s required. They are making great progress and have a shot at winning the retail race.

The race is still open, and like in any race, there will be winners and losers. May the best retailers win!

This article has been written by:

mr-naresh-ahujaNaresh Ahuja, Chairman and CEO, ETP Group

Naresh as the Founder, Chairman and CEO of the ETP Group leads the company with a clear focus on bringing enduring value to customers through best practices mirrored in software applications. Spanning 30 years of focus on retail domain expertise and IT development, ETP today, has a strong customer base of market leaders in more than 22 countries across Asia Pacific, India and the Middle East, and is Asia’s leading Omni-channel Retail Software company.

 

How does ‘Endless Aisle’ enhance the retail customer experience!

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Endless aisle is allowing customers to make use of technologies such as specially designed in-store kiosks or other intuitive systems to order items that are currently out-of-stock in that particular brick-and-mortar store. It is a concept that extends beyond the inventory that in tangible form is available in the store at a given point in time. Thus, endless aisle allows retailers to forge a strong link between customer demand and inventory. Retail companies that have been quick to embrace cross-channel strategies have already begun adopting the endless aisle technology to boost their sales further.

ETP Omni-channel Retail Solutions provide you with features such as Endless Aisle enabling you to deliver a unified brand-customer relationship across all channels.

How to manage omni-channel orders effectively

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Retail businesses across the globe are going all guns to enable themselves to constantly meet and exceed the hyper dynamic customer expectations while they are also dealing with the challenges and competition of the industry. Ultimately, it all boils to fulfilling the customers’ demands for products, services and experiences, as per their convenience, in a seamless manner. In simple words, giving the customer their desired products at the best perceived price, at the time and place they want it, without any glitches or hitches. This is the very essence of omni-channelizing the retail business. From the business point of view, for retailers, it is about achieving all of this while optimizing costs, reducing losses and risks and improving efficiency.

The best of part pf getting this right are that the benefits are multi-fold – increase in inventory turnover, reduction fulfillment costs, optimizing manpower cost, better productivity, enhance customer service, and the list goes on.

etp-blog-omnichannel-orders

But the main challenge for many businesses today is that they are still depending upon legacy systems which may not be at pace with these demands of the market and moreover do not support the operations when it comes to handling orders coming from different channels and fulfilling them using the best channel.  Here are three significant ways to handle omni-channel orders:

   1. Centralizing Order Management

A centralized order management system can enable control of all orders across the business as it could hold all the information from the order management process, including details of the order, sourcing, payments, and fulfillment. Moreover, a centralized solution will also factor in all the sales channels in the business operations. Therefore every fulfillment channel will have access to all the order information allowing the organization to appropriately allocate inventory based on factors such as stock levels, location and timing. So the entire order management process can be automated and controlled centrally, and even scaled if new channels are added.

   2. Enabling Better Inventory Visibility

One of the foremost challenges in implementing a successful omni-channel strategy is the lack of inventory visibility that emanates from disparate and siloed systems used to manage inventory. A centralized omni-channel order management system can enable a single view of the inventory and related information across all retail sales channels. This provides the visibility that is required to make strategic decisions that can help in improving cross-channel fulfillment, reducing mark-downs, tackling over-selling and under-selling, ensuring timely replenishment of stock. In turn, customers get real-time and true inventory information across the brand channels.

   3. Performing smart order allocation

Having the true picture of the inventory and stocks across channels and the related information along with the centralized control of the inventory will allow retail business owners to intelligently formulate business rules and algorithms to determine processes for inventory fulfillment. These business rules and logic can then be fed into the system that will automatically orchestrate and allocate orders across channels by routing it through the most suitable fulfillment center based on the criteria fed into the business logic.

Also Read: Why Is Luxury Retailing A Challenging Business

Why is luxury retailing a challenging business?

Posted on by admin

etp-blog-luxury-retail-challenges

Luxury products have always been one of the most admired and sought after products. So much so, that consumers of such products take pride in their possessions and are often considered to be of a higher class. They and their products are the ‘talk of the town’ most of the times in social gatherings and people like to be associated with such class conscious, brand loving and luxury seeking consumers. Luxury products therefore had few options and demanded a high cost of purchase deliberately tailored to a select set of consumers.

But now times have changed thanks to rapidly changing consumer mindsets and the very idea of “luxury” is evolving. The old-fashioned ideas that defined luxury as aspirational, high status, exclusive, wealthy, don’t really paint the exact picture of what customers perceive about luxury products. One of the drastic changes over the recent years is that the new age luxury isn’t for showoff.  Similarly other values that luxury brands exclusively attributed to, such as better quality and style, precise workmanship and great designs, are not exclusive any more to luxury.

Consumers’ tastes are evolving. There is an indisputable appeal for new products and services along with more choice of options yet having the flavor of uniqueness and exclusivity. This has given rise a various breeds of brands such as specialized ones and those that are highly customized to customer demands, thus increasing competition.

Further, along with changing tastes, customer shopping patterns and buying behavior have undergone a tremendous transformation. Traditionally, luxury shoppers heavily relied on physical retail to fulfill their desire for luxury goods. But now, multiple channels have come into the game and customers willingly switch between channels to get what they want. Seamless demand fulfillment across channels necessitates the reduction of various issues such as decrease in quality or other losses that are caused during the course of the supply chain. While older shoppers are still playing a significant role in the luxury market spends, millennials and Gen Zs are predicted to account for the larger growth in the coming years. Moreover, their new spending habits which are faster, more frequent, brand-conscious and trend-driven while being highly influenced by digital platforms.

All these are the modern day challenges that luxury retail businesses, especially the ones still depending heavily on the heritage and traditional processes are facing and there is one way out. They need to transform their retail businesses to omni-channel and employ the right omni channel retail software to exceed their customer expectations and fulfill their business goals.

Also Read: Moving From E-Commerce To Omni-Channel – Top 3 Challenges