Multichannel Merchant: Cognizant’s Director of Retail Consulting Outlines Six Steps to a More Effective, Holistic Omnichannel Strategy

“Retailers typically focus their omnichannel capabilities with laser-like precision on customer-facing functions. But many struggle to maintain healthy margins because they forget to sync up with the key departments and processes that customers never directly interact with,” writes Steven La Schiazza. “Merchandising, logistics, marketing and planning departments all play a key role in the assortment, pricing and promotions that influence shopper experience. Without their participation, efforts to create seamless customer experiences can fall flat — and so can profits.” Excerpts:

“Here are 6 steps for shaping a more holistic approach to omnichannel strategy that can help optimize margins by actively including merchandising, logistics and planning:

Establish cross-functional teams: Executives need to support merchandising with working groups that bring together members of marketing, supply chain, logistics and inventory planning teams.

Reorganize merchandising with clear roles/responsibilities: To ensure corporate focus on common goals, develop a flexible structure that includes common teams for buying, planning, and consumer insights, as well as for pricing, promotions, and markdowns.

Invest in IT and business processes: The good news is that retailers are getting better at managing the IT and business-process implications for enhancing the customer experience. A comprehensive review of customer preferences with appropriate business and IT enhancements to meet their needs can help smooth the process for retailers and shoppers alike.

Develop a goal-oriented incentive structure: Reinforce the omnichannel approach by tying bonuses to overall corporate numbers rather than specific business unit goals.

Adopt continuous, real-time planning: By implementing a cross-channel, integrated planning process, retailers can infuse agility and intelligence into the enterprise and improve responsiveness, anticipate trends and expand margins.

Don’t forget to plan for the cultural changes: Modifying retail culture to support omnichannel operations is especially challenging. Change management is crucial.

By adjusting their lens to focus company-wide as well as on customer touchpoints, retailers can create the channel-agnostic merchandise planning process that’s essential to omnichannel success.”

Click here to read more.