Stop playing good cop bad cop with your customers.

A new syndrome has been discovered among many retail brands in the Brick-n-Click space: multiple personality disorder. The brands suffering from this condition play good cop bad cop with their customers. At their online stores, these brands could be generous with their offers, but when shoppers visit their physical stores to enquire, the same brands sulk and say, ‘...but those are online offers, they can’t be availed at our physical stores!’
The unfortunate thing is that in most cases the brands themselves are not aware of this. These brands are caught in the octopus of omnichannel retailing.

The Octopus of Omnichannel Retailing

An omnichannel network resembles an octopus: it has multiple tentacles called ‘retail arms,’ straddling multiple formats. At each gesture of their movement, these arms come in contact with customers, giving rise to ‘touch points’. But there is one crucial difference. The arms of an octopus are in-sync with each other. The octopus survives because of the synergy that these arms generate.

An effective omnichannel retailing system must work the same way.

Understanding Omnichannel Retailing

In an omnichannel world, brands are increasingly being placed inside the famed mirror-room of Enter the Dragon. But the mirrors in this room are broken. Wherever they turn, the brands end up starting at their own reflections. The challenge is to make sure they don’t find a bull glaring back from one of the shards and a bear from the other. The customers will get confused.

“And when in confusion, customers move to the next store.”



Why Broken Mirrors?

Because the whole shopping experience has become fragmented. Customers compare products on an e-commerce portal, ask their friends on social media for advice, visit a branded store to confirm their biases and buy the product from a nearby shopping mall. The trick for the brands is to embrace O2O, or online-to-offline retailing, and throw a consistent face across these touch points. But retailers need access to the right kind of technology to attain this synchronicity, achieve sales synergy and reach out to their customers.

"The issue is not with the products. The issue is with the promotions."



Promotion means ‘product-motion’. It denotes the activity of moving products from shelves to shopping carts. In an omnichannel system, this movement must be nimble-but-coordinated. It is important that promotions are personalized to suit the needs of customers. But again, what use is personalization if customers find the whole activity unreliable, non-abominable.

Worry not. Qwikcilver has got your back. We have products to solve this issue.
QwikPosAPIx allows retailers to unify customer experience across different channels, while QwikPromox enables them to deliver highly-targeted, omnichannel promotions.
To know more, click here.

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