We sat down with Petter Balstad, CEO at Omnium, to discuss the critical role of order management in omnichannel customer journeys.
Why Do Omnichannel Retailers Need to Shift Their Focus to the Order Management Process?
Because it’s such a critical part of the customer’s experience of your brand! Many retailers make the mistake of talking about the “buying journey” and focusing all their efforts on optimizing every step up until an order is placed. But what about the post-purchase phase? There are a lot of challenges here that are critical to address in order to provide great customer experience.
The post-purchase phase is all about delivering on your customer promise. It includes answering questions about the status of an order, whether a product purchased online may be returned in a store or how to make a reclaim. If you just focus on optimizing the buying journey, you’ll miss out on all these critical customer touchpoints. Failing to deliver great customer service in the post-purchase process will lead to customers losing trust and loyalty to your brand.
For example, if a consumer contacts customer service to replace an item in their order, change the carrier option or add another item, they expect you to simply adjust their order there and then. Unfortunately, in many cases customers get the answer they need to cancel their order and place a new one in the online store because the backend system can’t handle these kinds of adjustments. With a modern order management system (OMS) customers can effortless change their order in real-time without the need to cancel and reorder.
How Can Retailers Meet the Ever-Increasing Consumer Expectations?
Consumer expectations on order fulfilment flexibility and speed may be higher than ever. But it’s not just the consumers driving this acceleration. Retailers are also part of this development, adding new sales channels, offering 24/7 shopping opportunities, providing multiple delivery options and as such giving the consumer a feeling that everything is possible.
The problem is many retailers still struggle to live up to these high expectations. In fact, even though we’ve been talking about omnichannel for 10-15 years now, most businesses are still not able to deliver a true omnichannel experience. Some are stuck in an organization where physical stores and online sales channels are managed in silos, with their own PNL, objectives and goals. Others have built a complex technology stack where channels cannot easily be integrated, and data is not shared across the organization.
To meet (or exceed) the expectations of today’s demanding consumers, retailers need to connect the different channels to ensure product, customer and order data is available for everyone in the organization. Store staff, customer service representatives and campaign managers should all have the same view of data to provide the ultimate customer experience across channels and touchpoints. This is where an OMS can help provide a single source of truth for inventory, orders, and customer data, enabling seamless customer experiences.
What Are the Most Common Challenges in Omnichannel Order Management?
When I speak to retailers there are three main challenges that almost always come up.
- Using a legacy ERP system for order management. Lacking a specialized order management system (OMS), most retailers handle the order flow in the ERP. This may work fine if you sell through a single channel and volumes are low. But as your business, channels and order complexity grow the ERP will hinder flexibility and innovation. Often, modifying an ERP to accommodate omnichannel-specific requirements involves expensive and time-consuming customizations that may not integrate seamlessly, creating a lock-in effect to the customized solution.
- Providing real-time inventory information to customers. When shopping online consumers want to know if a product is in stock for a web order, when it can be delivered and if they can find it at their local store to view it before placing an order. Providing inventory information is key to driving sales, whether online or in-store. But providing inaccurate information will not only damage customer trust in your brand but also ruin your bottom line. I’ve seen examples where up to 50% of click-and-collect orders are cancelled because of incorrect inventory information. With a specialized order management system retailers can get this number down to as little as 5%, and for smaller or high-end retailers in specialized markets, it could be even lower.
- Handling post-purchase communication. Making changes to an order after it’s been placed is often a clunky and cumbersome process for the customer service team – and dreadful for the customer. For example, if a customer realizes they can’t be at home to receive a delivery and therefore rather pick up the order in-store, they may be forced to cancel the order and redo the whole process on the website. If you can’t live up to your customer’s expectations on transparent and accurate post-purchase communication, customer satisfaction will drop and so will the trust and loyalty to your brand. An OMS simplifies post-purchase management by providing real-time visibility into orders and inventory across all channels, enabling seamless order adjustments like delivery re-routing or expedited refunds without disrupting the workflow.
Implementing an efficient, integrated and transparent order management process is critical to succeeding with your omnichannel ambitions. With seamless integration across channels and real-time inventory updates, an OMS will help you deliver on your customer promise and build long-term customer loyalty.
Is implementing an Order Management System (OMS) on your business agenda? Contact us to discuss your needs!
