The “Holy Grail” for today’s retailer – providing an omni-channel customer experience

The growing influence of eCommerce, kiosks, self scanning and numerous other sales channels is a great opportunity for today’s retailer. However, it creates a major new challenge – namely, how to manage diverse and sophisticated promotion offers across all channels, whilst providing a consistent customer experience, leaving retailers asking “how can I deliver a true omni-channel experience for my customers?”.

As the retail marketplace becomes increasingly competitive, retailers have looked to eCommerce and other channels to drive sales and to attract today’s technologically astute customer base. Unfortunately, the sales application for each channel typically has its own promotion setup and execution capabilities, which seldom have consistent calculation logic and offer types. Retailers are forced to set up promotions in each of the channel applications creating additional effort and opportunity for errors. It also means customers may well experience inconsistent behaviors for the same promotion in the different channels, something that is not likely to encourage customer loyalty nor repeat shopping visits.

The difficulties continue for the retailer when business teams need to provide new or emerging types of offers, perhaps those seen amongst their competitors or new market trends. Complex programming is most often necessary in one or more of the channels to support the desired offer types. This is generally a lengthy, risky and costly effort, which makes it unlikely that the new offers can be implemented in time to meet customer demands and market trends.

The solution to this problem is clear, the handling of promotions must be separated from the individual sales applications, using a standardized service that provides the same capabilities and consistent behavior across all channels. Couple this with a design that does not limit the retailer to a limited set of offer types nor restrict the use of coupons, customer segments and other necessary capabilities and the problem is solved, delivering the ultimate goal of a true omni-channel customer experience!

Perhaps the “holy grail” is within reach after all.

Helping Retailers

The XCCommerce Promotions Solution provides an externalized solution for the definition and execution of promotion offers, designed to be used by the sales applications across all channels. This provides a true omni-channel capability, allowing a single definition of promotions, targeting the offers to the desired channels, whilst delivering consistency in how the promotions are calculated and applied.

With the implementation of the XCCommerce Promotions Solution, retailers integrate their sales channels to the externalized promotion engine and begin to use an unlimited array of offer types.

Contact the XCCommerce team for more details on the extensive promotion functionality that is available in the Promotions Solution Suite.

This article is presented by XCCommerce’s team of retail experts. Advising global leaders in the retail industry for over 20 years,
the team at XCCommerce has developed valuable retail insights and expertise.

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