Aligning Operations with Multichannel Management in the Retail Industry

If one of your most valued customers enters your retail outlet today, can he or she select a product that is out-of-stock in the store from your Internet site? Conversely, can a valued customer surfing your website pick up orders at nearby store locations? Only a handful of retailers can answer "yes" to both questions. Too many have inadvertently isolated the operations of their various channels—in-store, product catalog and Internet shopping experiences as not integrated.

As a result, customers have a disjointed shopping experience. Retailers miss out on cross-channel sales, and cannot effectively build and extend their brands. Accenture's integrated customer overview approach helps solve the problem, allowing retailers to unlock the value of multichannel shopping and position themselves to achieve high performance.

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Accenture can help retailers integrate the shopping experience across multiple channels and so achieve high performance.

To achieve this integration, Accenture helps retailers craft a single view of the customer, regardless of whether that customer is online or in the checkout line, so that those multichannel customers who contribute the greatest profits to the bottom line can be identified. The behavior and values of retailers' best targets are then defined. The end result is that retailers have greater leverage over the power of individual channels, leading to higher sales and more satisfied customers.