Page 11 - Logistics News July 2019

Thought Leadership
4. Shipping: Packaging and transporting the
products.
5. Last-mile delivery: Taking the product to the
end-customer, the return of shipments.
6. After-sales: Customer care, consumer services. future, bots will be the default channel by which
How can companies go the omnichannel way?
Tracing the customer journey: Figuring out the
customer journey is critical to going omnichannel.
How do people fi nd your company? What
channels are they using and how are they using
them? How do they interact with your brand?
Understand your customer: Know their
preferences, shopping habits, purchasing
destination, the frequency of purchase and
presence on the internet.
Figuring out the logistics: Companies need to sort
out their logistics requirements fi rst, do they need
to outsource the delivery vehicles? How will they
take care of the reverse logistics?
Integrate your approach: Organisations need to
be consistent with their communication, look and
feel, and customer experience across all channels. wants to shop, their USPs and benefi ts, and
Benefi ts of omnichannel fulfi lment
At its core, a good omnichannel fulfi lment process
should ensure that all orders are executed after
evaluating all possible channels and supply
sources. Centralised data should lead to a better
demand forecast that will reduce wasting of
inventory or overproduction of goods. Providing
diff erent buying channels and having channel
specifi c communication leads to better customer
experience and increased customer retention. The
organisation can also gather its learning from one
channel and use it in another to provide a more
fulfi lling experience to the customers and improve
overall effi ciency.
• Reduced inventory costs with accurate inventory
management.
• Increase in revenue with new market
opportunities.
• Improved customer experience.
• Decreased shipping costs.
• Minimising labour costs.
• Cross channel insights.
In addition, a recent study by HBR found that
omnichannel shoppers spend 4 percent more,
on average, during in-store shopping trips and
10 percent more online than customers who only
used a single channel.
Future of omnichannel
Expect enterprises to move from a ‘multi-
channel’ model to a ‘channel-less’ model as
omnichannel retail becomes more and more
seamless. Rather than adding more channels,
July 2019 | Logistics News
companies will begin to orchestrate the
customer experience by pairing channels to
make a consumer’s experience easier.
An article from ET Retail suggests that in the
we will place our orders. The bot will let the
consumers know that it has put in the order for
daily/weekly grocery supplies from the preferred
online grocer using the rate of consumption,
historical data, quantity left over in the cupboard
and smart refrigerator to calculate the order. In
many cases, the online grocers will automatically
work out the weekly order based on predictive
analytics using the consumption and shopper
data, and inform the bot the ETA of the courier/
drone. Basically, all our mundane tasks of
ordering groceries and daily use products will be
taken care of by our bots.
The article goes on to suggest that even
the smart commute that the customers will
use will have interactive TV displaying all the
retailers selling the products that the customer
the best deals available that day for a specifi c
customer based on proximity and preference
using big data and IoT! Once the customer
chooses the retailer he or she wants to visit,
the smart display will enable the taxi to drive
there and will let the retailer know in real time
that the customer is on their way to them, the
ETA, interest in the products that day, etc. So,
while a lot of our shopping in 2030 may still be
impulsive, predictive analytics will ensure that
there is a fair bit of planning around this done
by the machines around us.
Key fi ndings
• The advent of e-commerce has shaken the
retail space; to facilitate faster gratifi cation
to customers, retail companies are trying to
shorten their distribution processes by going
the omnichannel way.
• With customers using multiple channels for
shopping, brands need to be present where
their customers are.
• Understanding customer journey and
behaviour, and integrating the channels to
provide the essential customer ‘experience’ is
the deciding factor of omnichannel retailing
success.
• Data-driven analysis that uses artifi cial
intelligence to predict upcoming trends might
be the future of omnichannel retail.
• In the future, retail will shift from using
multiple channels to a channel-less experience,
where it will be virtually impossible to separate
the diff erent mediums of retailing. •
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