These days, retail customer journeys can involve a multitude of nonlinear touchpoints, with customers encountering the brand on social media, the website, and marketplaces and possibly even swinging by a brick-and-mortar store before making a purchase. If any one of these experiences is disjointed from the rest, the brand risks losing the customer's trust and business. This is where a unified commerce strategy comes in. It ensures customers have a fluid, personalized, and enjoyable experience at every step of their journey, regardless of where they shop. Unified commerce also ensures businesses can provide these smooth customer experiences with ease.
This guide discusses the best practices required for a successful unified commerce strategy.
1. Determine the Objectives
Start by defining clear objectives for your unified commerce strategy. Identify the problems you aim to solve and the goals you hope to achieve. Keep in mind that unified commerce is ideal for synchronizing and streamlining customer experiences across channels so consumers have the same great experience everywhere they interact with the brand. Unified commerce also ensures that when customers switch channels, they can pick up from where they left off. Most importantly, businesses can unlock all of these advantages with the same efficiency and ease on the back end.
2. Define the Customer Journey
Another essential practice is to clearly map out the customer journey, detailing every touchpoint and interaction across various channels. Identify pain points and areas of opportunity to enhance the customer experience. Recognize that the customer journey is often nonlinear and fluid, requiring more flexibility and adaptability to meet evolving customer needs. For example, a customer might see a product on social media, visit the website to learn more about the product and brand, read reviews on a third-party site, go into a physical store to try things on, look at the competition online, and finally make a purchase on the company's website. Seeing the journey allows for understanding and also creates opportunities to predict future behaviors and needs.
3. Dissolve Operational Silos
The problems that arise from individual, disjointed operations are the main reason businesses pivot to unified commerce, but these silos can also make the transition challenging in and of itself. From the customer's perspective, silos can translate to online and in-store inventory systems that are out of sync and out of date. If a customer drives to the store only to find out the product is not in stock as the website suggested, they will likely leave frustrated and possibly choose to shop elsewhere. Breaking down the silos ensures customers have a smooth experience as they move through in-person, online, and multichannel brand experiences. In terms of the back-end experience, a unified approach requires seamless integration or a single platform solution to achieve complete efficiency within the tech stack so that employees are not scrambling to manage redundant workflows to synchronize the customer experience across every channel.
4. Leverage Advanced Technology
In implementing a unified commerce strategy, leveraging advanced technology is paramount. The seamless integration of various touchpoints necessitates sophisticated tools capable of gathering and analyzing vast amounts of data, including customer preferences, behaviors, and performance metrics. These insights inform strategic decision-making, drive operational efficiency, and enhance the overall customer experience. Data analytics tools, machine learning (ML) algorithms, and artificial intelligence (AI) systems play pivotal roles in this process, offering predictive analytics, personalized recommendations, and real-time inventory management capabilities. Furthermore, it's essential to recognize that technology is continuously evolving, necessitating a commitment to ongoing innovation and adaptation to remain competitive in the dynamic landscape of unified commerce.
5. Implement Real-Time Inventory Management
Implementing real-time inventory management is integral to ensuring that stock availability remains current regardless of when or where a customer decides to make a purchase. This capability is crucial for enhancing customer satisfaction and maximizing sales opportunities. By relying on a thoroughly integrated eCommerce solution, businesses can mitigate the risk of overstocking and stockouts, optimizing inventory levels to effectively meet demand without sacrificing efficiency on the back end. With real-time visibility into inventory levels across all channels, businesses can promptly fulfill customer orders, minimize disruptions, and drive more sales.
6. Personalize the Customer Experience
Personalization is a cornerstone in crafting a superior customer experience, and it is essential to ensure that the right person encounters the right offering at the opportune moment. By anticipating customer needs through insights from past behavior, order history, and defined preferences, businesses can streamline the customer journey and foster deeper connections with their audience. Whether through tailored product recommendations, targeted marketing campaigns, personalized customer service interactions, or customized in-store shopping experiences, personalization empowers businesses to deliver relevant and meaningful interactions that resonate with their customers personally, ultimately driving engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction.
7. Create a Consistent Brand Experience
Creating a consistent brand experience fosters customer trust and loyalty, as brand identity hinges on reliability and uniformity across touchpoints. Consistency in messaging, design elements, and overall experience standards instills confidence in customers, helping them to recognize and recall the brand with ease. This alignment not only reinforces the brand image but also serves as a testament to quality assurance, helping customers understand the brand's commitment to excellence. While it's important to acknowledge each channel's unique characteristics, maintaining alignment ensures that the brand maintains its integrity and resonates with customers regardless of where they engage, ultimately strengthening brand perception and driving long-term success.
8. Empower Employees
Empowering employees is essential for ensuring the success of a unified commerce strategy. Providing them with the necessary tools and training enables them to effectively engage with customers, manage operations, and uphold the brand's image in alignment with the unified strategy. For example, an in-store sales representative may need to assist a customer with a technical online inquiry or speak to the website's features, while an online customer service representative should be capable of delivering the same high-quality service as their in-store counterpart. By investing in employee empowerment, businesses can enhance the customer experience, drive operational efficiency, and strengthen brand loyalty.
9. Prioritize Data Security and Privacy
Prioritizing data security and privacy is crucial to the implementation of unified commerce platforms, given their reliance on extensive data collection and processing. To adhere to regulations and earn customer trust, businesses must strongly emphasize safeguarding sensitive information. This entails implementing robust security measures, educating employees on best practices, and maintaining transparent communication with customers regarding data handling practices. Furthermore, adherence to data privacy laws is imperative to mitigate risks and protect both customer privacy and organizational integrity. By prioritizing data security and privacy, businesses can cultivate a culture of trust, instill confidence among customers, and safeguard their reputation in an increasingly data-driven environment.
10. Implement a Unified Commerce Platform
By consolidating all solutions into a central hub, businesses can ensure seamless integration and real-time data synchronization across channels. This unified approach fosters consistency in the customer experience, drives operational efficiency, and delivers more optimal outcomes. With data accessible and synchronized in real-time, businesses can gain insights crucial for making informed decisions and tailoring offerings to meet evolving needs. Ultimately, a unified commerce platform empowers businesses to stay agile, responsive, and competitive in today's dynamic marketplace.
11. Evaluate Outcomes and Adjust
Maintaining a successful unified commerce strategy requires careful evaluation of outcomes and continual improvements. This process begins by setting and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with strategic objectives, including operational efficiency, data security, customer retention, sales performance, and customer satisfaction. By systematically monitoring these metrics, businesses can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of their initiatives and identify improvement areas. Armed with actionable data, they can then make informed decisions and implement necessary adjustments to optimize performance and achieve better results. This iterative approach ensures that the unified commerce strategy fosters sustained growth and success.
Unified Commerce with Encora
Encora has a long history of delivering exceptional software engineering & product engineering services across a range of tech-enabled industries. Encora's team of software engineers is experienced in developing innovative commerce solutions, which is why fast-growing companies partner with Encora to outsource product development and drive growth. We are deeply expert in the various disciplines, tools, and technologies that power the emerging economy, and this is one of the primary reasons that clients choose Encora over the many strategic alternatives that they have.
To implement a unified commerce solution, contact Encora today!
