Omni-channel Analytics – The Future of Retail

The past few months have seen consumers increasingly move online for most retail purchases. While most of it has been due to inability to venture out for weekly shopping trips, it surely has opened up a large consumer base for online businesses in the long run. Does it mean retail stores would be out of business? Well, Darwin said, “those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed”. As a retailer, this is the time to adopt to new consumer behavior with a new business model and strategy.

Not servicing customers online is no longer a choice. If you are a brick and mortar retail chain and have not yet made a dent in the online universe, the time to do so is now. If you have an online presence along with your physical store(s), but struggling to make sense of it all, this post will help you understand how the right analytics tool can help you manage omni-channel retail better. To master omni-channel retail, you need to actively track the pulse of the market, changing customer preferences and respond with appropriate merchandising, pricing and offers and then track the execution, just as diligently.

Before we get to deciphering the omni-channel analytics code, let’s make a brief pit-stop to understand what is omni-channel retail and why is it necessary.

What is omni-channel retail?

Omni-channel retail refers to retailing through both online and offline channels. Your customers can

• Shop online and get items home-delivered
• Complete the purchase online and pick up the product from your store
• Shop at your physical store, in-person

Going omni-channel is necessary because purchase behavior has heavily altered post-COVID. Channel preferences have changed as people prefer shopping online from the safety of their homes, or placing online orders for curbside pickups to avoid queues at the stores. One may also argue that COVID has hastened a change that was already underway. Millennials have been increasingly taking a hybrid omni-channel journey towards most purchases even before COVID was first detected.

Convenience, most of all, decides what, why, how and when a product is purchased. If something can wait for a week or is cumbersome to carry, e-commerce home delivery is the preferred choice. If something is immediately required it would get picked up on the drive to or from work. Interestingly, “immediately required” products are not just essential health or grocery products, but it could also be “Ghost of Tsushima”, the latest PS4 release.

Without the pandemic, the shift would have still happened, but, in all likelihood, would have taken a few years. COVID has made more people jump on to the wagon of hybrid (online & offline combined) purchase journey in a few weeks.

How does omni-channel analytics help?

Omni-channel analytics, simply put, gives you a complete picture of your business and consumer interactions across all the sales channels.

Today, it is more important than ever because COVID has made the consumer journey much more complex. Say, a customer visits the store looking for a specific product and doesn’t buy it; would you consider it a lost opportunity? There’s a good chance she might order the same product online from your website or from one of your online distributors. It could have happened because she found the product cumbersome to carry or was hesitant to wait in the billing line around other people, even though you had put social distancing norms in place. Reasons could be plenty; taking decisive action on every potential opportunity will be imperative.

To know what needs fixing and what doesn’t, the starting point is data. On that front, here are a few questions you need to ask yourself if you are leading the omni-channel retail efforts at your organization:

1.     Have there been any significant / unusual purchasing channel shifts for certain categories or at certain locations?

2.     Do you have enough data on customer segment affinity for each channel and its changing trends?

3.     What does your data tell you about product purchase patterns across channels? Are certain products bought more in certain channels?

4.     Have you been tracking and mapping customer journey as well you should be?

5.     Do you have any reasons to believe (because of data or even anecdotal) of cross-channel shopping patterns/trends?

Here are three reasons to explain the importance of the above data, and the need of a comprehensive analytics tool to track the changes more closely in omni-channel retail:

1.   Bridging the fragmented consumer journey

Based on consumer preferences data by segment, channel and location you can streamline your efforts to attain the product to marketing channel fit resulting in a greater number of conversions, reducing returns and ensuring high-level of consumer satisfaction.

For example, you see the launch of a particular high-value product receiving a lot of attention on your online channel. However, you notice it hasn’t been converting well, as consumers are predisposed towards checking out the physical product before making a purchase. In such cases, you can direct the consumers to the nearest store if they wish to. To make it more compelling, you can assure them of a faster checkout if they happen to visit the store.

With Omni-channel analytics, you can identify cross-channel shopping patterns/trends. Apart from tracking macro-level shift from offline to online, you can also understand if there is a shift from web to mobile. With the growing importance of mobile in online shopping, integration of mobile analytics can also help you map the consumer journey better.

2.   Inventory Optimization

If most people are going to shop online, eventually inventory may pile up at your retail stores and remain stuck there, even as you struggle to fulfill online orders. Addressing the problem would require you to either start stocking less at your retail stores, or use them as fulfillment centers for your online business. The former strategy will reduce your space requirements significantly, helping you save on rent and bring down your supply chain costs. The latter strategy will be better if you are tied into rent/lease agreements and this will enable you to service your customers more efficiently with quicker delivery times and lower shipping costs.

Thus, tracking data related to consumer preferences down to each segment/channel/zip-code will help you optimize your inventory and also trim costs. In times of stressed cash flow, like the one we are currently in, inventory optimization would be your best strategy.

Omni-channel analytics will help you walk the tight rope of inventory management and optimum fulfillment across channels. Inventory data between all your locations can be shared and viewed inside a single omni-channel inventory management system.

3.   Streamlining Operations

Without a holistic approach to analytics, the probability of getting caught off-guard in unfavorable operational situations runs high. For example, as you focus on rebuilding your offline channel, you witness a sudden spike of orders on your online channels. Your first reaction (seemingly most feasible at that point of time) would be to utilize your store staff to pick and pack delivery orders. Needless to say, without trained and adequate staff you are staring at an operational nightmare at significant cost to the business. When cash-flow through any channel is critical to your business customer dissatisfaction and a high percentage of returns is the last thing you wish for.

Can this be avoided? Yes, with omni-channel analytics you would have complete visibility across each of your channels. Equipped with the ability to predict emerging trends, you can be better prepared for most eventualities.

Steering towards Growth

If you’ve switched to omni-channel retail recently, from a pure offline or online play, you need to be doubly cautious of moves you make. As much as you would like to believe you are in the same business of selling the same product, you are far from it. Addition of a new channel changes the business dynamics, cost structures, and organizational workflows more than you would like to believe. Above everything else, it is the consumer behavior that differs based on the channel. You need to be cognizant of the fact that you are navigating uncharted waters.

Until now, if you have been unsure of which way your omni-channel ship is heading, you need to get your navigational aid and assistant right away. A well-built Omni-channel analytics tool can help you track the changes regularly. You may also set up alerts to take decisive actions proactively.

Blik.ai offers all the necessary features and more. With Blik.ai’s predefined online dashboards that integrate with Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, you can monitor and run your online business better. With Blik.ai’s integration with ticketing and call-center tools, you get access to call volumes and conversions on the telesales channel. Blik.ai also is soon adding integrations with a few POS systems in partnership with a few Retail Analytics Consulting firms and that will allow you to monitor your offline business performance as well. With this, you will have a holistic view of your business and the changing customer behavior.

The looming information deficit, caused by channel sales data either not flowing in or not being adequately tapped, has been a long-standing problem of omni-channel retail. The resulting exclusive focus on either channel has often been a nemesis of brick and retail businesses venturing into online space.

While being data-driven is a good starting point, without a holistic omni-channel analytics tool you stand a risk of being stung at the wrong hour and on the wrong foot. If you are unsure of where to begin, sign up for a free trial at blik.ai and understand how you can up your game and redefine your business for a new world. or even write to us at [email protected] . We will help you harness the data and ensure you stay ahead of the curve with our purpose-built and AI-powered dashboards.

Author Profile:

Randhir Hebbar is one of the founders of Convergytics — Asia’s fastest growing and leading analytics brand. Randhir heads Digital, BI, AI and Products at Convergytics and Blik.ai is a solution that he has conceptualized, designed and built with his team of team of developers, BI specialists, data engineers and data scientists. You can read some of his other posts here.

About Blik.ai:

Blik.ai is Convergytics’ proprietary end-to-end business intelligence platform for SaaS platforms and provides one-click integrations and pre-built modern-BI dashboards for platforms like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Google AdWords and FreshDesk. Many more integrations are in the works and are being added each week.

If you are looking for a quick and easy solution to aid in your data-driven decision-making journey, do get in touch with us by writing to us at [email protected] or just sign up for a trial at blik.ai to understand how you can utilize Blik to navigate these uncertain times.

About Convergytics:

Convergytics is a Microsoft Gold Partner for Data and Analytics. We focus on four core areas:

(1)   Data Management and Data Engineering: data ingestion, validation, transformation, warehousing and OLAP

(2)   BI and Advanced Dashboards: reporting KPIs/metrics, real-time BI, automated monitoring and alerts, ETL, executive/operational dashboards

(3)   Digital and CRM Analytics: site optimization and A/B testing, digital audits and implementations, optimizing digital media spends, real time personalization and predictive CRM, and automated reporting

(4)   AI and Machine Learning: forecasting, safety and risk, defect prevention and preventive maintenance use cases