New O Alliance Report Reveals Top Five Keys To - Uthor Christine Kern

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Retailers are struggling to become customer-centric, report finds.

More than two-thirds of retailers are struggling to transition from an omni-channel model to a customer-centric one, according to new research from strategic consulting firm The O Alliance.  In its new industry stud and research report, created in partnership with Revmetrix, The O Alliance also revealed five key strategies to establish models that put the customer at the center of business.

As a recent Revmetrix blog post explains, we now sit “in an omnichannel world, and the stage is set for another reinvention of the retail industry. Enter Customer Centric Commerce. Whereas omnichannel was about building an infrastructure that enabled and supported cross-channel customer journeys, Customer-Centric Commerce is about building an infrastructure that enables and supports a single view of your customers across all channels. Retailers know that customer interactions happen within the context of a journey – a journey which spans multiple screens 40-50 percent of the time – so why don’t they see their customer data that way?”

The report, “Retail Transformation Underway: Achieving Customer-Centric Commerce,” asked 150 senior executives across all sectors of retail to complete critical self-assessments and then categorized them into Leaders, Followers, and Bystanders. Leaders have taken steps to better understand consumer data and invest in customer insights, technology and organizational redesign; Followers have plans to transition to customer-centric business and have already made some progress toward that goal; and Bystanders demonstrate a lack of meaningful progress or plans.

“Customer-facing tools such as smartphones, tablets, and in-store kiosks have become mission critical to the shopping experience, yet most retailers still have not integrated these tools into a cohesive system that creates circular commerce,” said Andrea Weiss, Founder of The O Alliance. “While omni-channel was about giving shoppers a single view of a brand across all touch-points, the customer-centric model is about giving the brand a single view of the shopper, understanding who she is, what she wants, and how she behaves at all times.”

According to the report, retail Leaders are leveraging five key strategies in their efforts to successfully achieve customer centricity:

• Track a customer’s behavior across channels. As the report demonstrates, retailers much connect a shopper’s activities online, instore, on social media, and via mobile apps in order to create a universal customer profile.
• Measure success of cross-channel marketing. The report found that customer-centric Leaders are implementing tools that provide a strategic view into each campaign, to gauge effectiveness, attribute proper credit, and leverage insights to drive future marketing decisions.
• Centralize data solutions. Leaders are adopting flexible, cloud-based solutions in order to easily access all product and customer information in one centralized location.
• Structure a customer-centric organization. Ninety-seven percent of Leaders reported that they have integrated at least one team to date, and Leaders are also addressing talent and leadership issues demanded by such changes, including instituting a C-level executive in a customer centric role.
• Crush obstacles to customer centricity. According to the report, “the solution does not lie in a quick fix of any one business component. Seamless Circular Commerce will only be achieved through directional shifts across all areas of the company – from CMO and CIO offices, to Human Resources, Finance, Executive Committees and Boards.”