Retailers Have A Blind Spot When It Comes To Digital

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Bridging the digital divide with customers: how retailers can win big.

Retailers are totally under-estimating the influence digital technology has on store sales, according to RSR’s latest research on retailers’ omnichannel strategies. Forrester estimated that 52 percent of retail sales in 2015 were influenced by consumers’ digital activities, and that this influence will rise to 59 percent by 2018. But while consumer behaviors reflect these rising engagements, retailers themselves are giving little credence to the role digital plays in their overall sales.

The Retailers’ Omni-Channel Blind Spot: Digital report found that almost half (48 percent) of respondents said that 10 percent or less of their sales can be attributed to digital channels, while 41 percent say digital influences just 25 percent or less of their store sales. An additional 14 percent say they have no way to measure the online influence of store purchases, while 11 percent say that this will still be problematic  three years down the road.

The report found that, while retailers have seemingly pulled themselves out of last year’s funk, they still have not made significant progress in integrating processes across all selling channels.   Among the study’s key findings:

• Retailers know that a positive experience in just one channel is not enough to keep customer loyalty and that consumer behaviors across channels remains unpredictable, but Winners stay focused on consumer behaviors rather than on the competition to prioritize their next steps.
• Retailers also have the right intentions when it comes to digital’s role, seeking to focus on the needs of consumers before making more sales, but the study also revealed a disconnect between top strategy objectives and the opportunities retailers rate most highly.
• Retail Winners also focus on inefficiencies in the current operational model to support omnichannel shopping, as reflected in the importance vs. state of process integration. As the study asserts, “it all boils down to ‘old processes/old technologies’ when it comes to inhibitors to omnichannel success.”
• In order to make a seamless, synchronized omnichannel environment possible, retailer must adopt a long laundry list of technologies, and Retail Winners take a unique approach to prioritizing this technology challenges.

Among the bootstrap recommendations of the report are to create an executive team that lives digital as much as store; a company that is dedicated to modernizing technology and process; and a company that utilizes all the potential data at its fingertips to create actionable plans; and to actively search out differentiation.