In RSR Research’s Omni-Channel 2012: Cross-Channel Comes of Age study, all retailers interviewed agreed on one issue: the customer experience should be consolidated across all marketing channels for a consistent experience. Yet only 32 percent of respondents feel they have reached that goal.
Is that surprising? Not at all, given the many barriers to integrating multichannel marketing data reflecting a complex customer journey. Fifty-five percent of respondents cited lack of a single view of customer behaviors across all channels as the biggest inhibitor.
Perhaps more concerning is the gap between what capabilities retailers rank as valuable compared to what they’ve fully implemented.
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Source: RSR Research’s Omni-Channel 2012: Cross-Channel Comes of Age
It’s significant that customer visibility and customer insights score top slots on retailers’ priority lists. “Without an integrated, omnichannel operation, personalization remains a siloed, channel-specific experience,” said Deena Amato-McCoy, Research Analyst at Aberdeen Group. “Since shoppers expect to have the same experience online as they do on their mobile devices or in stores, providing separate and departmentalized experiences is the quickest way to kill loyalty.”
Customers are telling retailers that they need to understand social and mobile behaviors, a key to determining how paid, owned and earned media (POEM) influence one another and affect conversions. RSR Research’s Nikki Baird is also hearing these sorts of questions from top retailers. In her May 6 blog post, she noted one of the four biggest questions she gets is, “What role should social data play in generating customer insights?” Retailers can now gain insights on questions they never could before, such as the impact of product ratings on demand and whether customer sentiment can be used to predict purchasing behavior. Baird believes “taking on social insights is fairly ambitious” because “the basics of customer data have been difficult to come by and maintain over time.” Companies that can make social insights actionable will be at a distinct competitive advantage.
Retailers and others that can leverage mobile insights into their marketing strategies are also poised to win big against the competition. More than 30 percent of merchants are not using mobile technology, and fewer than half operate a mobile website, according to a Retail TouchPoints study sponsored by Motion Computing. For the majority of retailers using mobile technology, new numbers from the U.S. Commerce Department estimate that shoppers spent more than $58 billion online – using PCs, smartphones and tablets – in the first quarter of 2013, representing a 15.3 percent increase over the same quarter in 2012. Deloitte expects that mobile devices will influence $700 billion in retail sales by 2016. In its study, The Dawn of Mobile Influence, the firm reports that more than 5 percent of online purchases are completed via mobile devices and predicts that percentage will grow to 21 in three years.
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