Omni Channel Shopping

Over the last year and culminating with the Gray Thursday / Black Friday holiday kick off shopping event it seems to me that there has been no major progress or extension of the omni channel shopping experience.  I have seen where the online experience has been expanded and a greater focus placed on the online experience, however there still seems to be a very solid line between the online and the brick and mortar experience.  The only crossover I’ve seen from the major retailers is to suggest to shoppers in the store that if they can’t find an item in the store the shopper should look online.  From an omni channel shopping perspective this has been a disappointing season.

I’m disappointed because there are so many little steps that could have been taken that would have really enhanced the overall customer experience across both the online and the brick and mortar shopping experiences.  I see the omni channel shopping experience as a collaborative shopping experience between the customer and the retailer, between the online and the brick and mortar outlets and even between the retailer and the manufacturer.  This to me means that you must focus on reducing or eliminating any real or imagined competition between the channels and present a seamless shopping experience that focuses on the customers’ experience.

I have seen a great many deals offered both online and in the stores this year.  This is a great opportunity for the customer but the experience is still separated between the online and the brick and mortar outlets.  A great way to start is to allow and encourage a customer to purchase in a store and ship the product to their home or final recipient destination.  It is very common now for retailers to offer the purchase online and pick up in the store option however it is not very common at all for the retailer to allow the customer to purchase in the store and ship it to their home, one retailer that supports this is Eddie Bauer.  Eddie Bauer does this with a phone desk in each store that is connected directly to their catalog call center and the shipping charges are waived for customers that place an order from the store.  This is a creative way to complete the sale and provide the ‘endless aisle’ concept that so many retailers advertise.

Another simple opportunity is variable discounts on a sale.  The majority of retailers offer these scratch and save cards either in the store or provide the card in a sale flyer for the customer to scratch and show for a discount in the store.  Why not offer this scratch and save via the mobile phone and email.  This is a feature that Red Box offers frequently to customers and its a great way to encourage purchases.  The added twist that retailers could provide is variable discounts between online and in store purchases that could be adjusted on the fly depending on the current sales and inventory availability.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

What types of cross channel services and offerings would you like to see to enhance your shopping experience?  Retailers are focused on maintaining sales volumes through reductions in pricing rather than expansion of sales, or even maintaining sales through creative utilization of eCommerce services. Did you shop over the Gray Thursday / Black Friday period?  What was your experience in stores and malls?

Omni Channel Shopping

This season my family took advantage of the new shopping offering of ‘Gray Thursday’ and went to the local shopping mall at 9:00 PM to get our annual fix of frenzied Christmas shopping.  We actually missed the earliest door busters but were still able to experience the event.  This year’s event was a little surprising to me because of the basic fact that there were no new omni channel shopping opportunities.  This was surprising to me because of the potential opportunities I recognized in the last year.  I find this especially interesting because at the same time that people have been discussing the opportunities and increases in online sales it seems that not one retailer has taken the steps to increase their omni channel shopping support.

I’m disappointed that there have been so many missed opportunities to enhance the experience.  The major retailers are talking a great game about the omni channel shopping but I see that most are losing out on enhancing the experience.  There are great opportunities to cross over from eCommerce to brick and mortar however in my experience these are just lost opportunities.  This seems to have been the year for social shopping tools and third party sales tools over the Internet in the form of Groupon, LivingSocial and RetailMeNot shopping coupon type services, then you have tools such as Yelp, Urbanspoon and Where for help in locating products and rating services.  

The gaping hole in progress over the previous year is new eCommerce capabilities from retailers that cross over channels.  When I went to the mall with my family this year I expected there to be a lot of advertising in stores promoting their eCommerce capabilities.  Unfortunately there was nothing in sight, even from retailers like Best Buy Mobile and Verizon.  This year the retailers frankly seem focused on maintaining sales share through price reductions rather than gaining sales share through increased utilization of eCommerce advertising and sales capabilities.  Retailers are allowing the large retailers such as Wall Mart drive their strategy into matching the price reductions to maintain sales share which only reduces the margin and requires even greater sales increases to deliver profits.  This is a losing strategy for all retailers!

I am getting closer and closer to converting to eCommerce shopping for Christmas and birthdays simply because of the convenience.  I find the brick and mortar shopping experience to be more and more disappointing and even unnecessary for most of my needs.  Some things will always require the personal experience of seeing and touching the merchandise, however those products are becoming fewer and farther between.  

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

What types of cross channel services and offerings would you like to see to enhance your shopping experience?  Retailers are focused on maintaining sales volumes through reductions in pricing rather than expansion of sales, or even maintaining sales through creative utilization of eCommerce services. Did you shop over the Gray Thursday / Black Friday period?  What was your experience in stores and malls?

Crowdsourcing Tools Review

As I have previously discussed, crowdsourcing is another category of social networking and so the tools supporting this are also social networking and team development tools.  I have also previously suggested that you focus on free tools in building this capability across your collaborative network because it will encourage adoption of the tools by your partners.  It is especially important to take into account the adoption and use of tools by your partners because the success of your crowdsourcing depends on the adoption of the tools by your partners.

Social networking and team management and support tools is currently in a robust state of discontinuous change requiring flexibility and imagination to support the needs of your partners and your efforts in achieving value from your crowdsourcing efforts.  This translates into expecting the loss of tools and expecting, and planning for, the loss of or need to replace tools.  Using my own experience in using tools to capture and even share discussions I can say that sometimes this can be very frustrating.  The selection runs the gamut from robust tools that provide both free and subscription based plans to very simple notes tools.  

Another important aspect or feature of tools is the ability to support, access and update from multiple platforms simultaneously.  In my opinion, this is the most important feature requirement.  There are many tools that may profess to provide this capability but many of these tools don’t deliver on that promise.  An interesting point to this requirement is that tools that charge for the service are not necessarily more capable in supporting this feature.

Where does this leave you though from a tools perspective?  There are two types of tools in this group;

1. Tools that support content collaboration such as Dropbox or Google Drive.  These tools provide the platform to share and collaborate on documents across platforms and are free to use.
2. Tools that support the social networking and team management such at LinkedIn, Google+ and Evernote.  These tools all provide the ability to connect and communicate to a group along with a robust notification and participation capability through email or smartphone apps.

I feel it is important to understand and classify the capabilities of tools so that you can evaluate the tools against your process and people requirements.  It is very easy to get lost in the tools evaluation process and lose sight of the objective and requirements you are trying to support.  Remember, the sequence of execution is critical to the success of any effort, focus on process first, then the people that will use the process and then you can be the most successful in selecting the technology and tools to support your requirements and deliver your objectives.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

How do you incorporate the different methods of communication to support your collaborative network needs and objectives?  Do you have a formal maintenance communication plan that your partners have participated in developing?  How does the informal communications methods impact and support the formal communications?  Have you developed an evaluation plan for your communications methods, a type of continuous improvement process for your communication methods and communications plans?