Posted by Breanne Richardson, Retail Fashion Marketing Coordinator, NetSuite
Retailers and fashion brands are under enormous pressure to provide better shopping experiences while remaining profitable. That has meant evaluating different technology platforms with the hope of improving the customer journey efficiently and cost-effectively. Yet most are scratching their heads at where to even begin.
Below are the five strategic steps retailers and fashion brands need to take to deliver superior customer experience and resolve the technology obstacles that inhibit innovation.
Build your foundation
To achieve success in today’s digital competitive marketplace, businesses must simplify processes by consolidating their core systems. Remedying siloed systems and initiating a one-system approach is your first step. You’ll eliminate data fragmentation and duplication, while delivering real-time information, creating efficiencies and opportunities to improve the customer experience.
With a one-system approach, your back-end enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and order and inventory management systems will reside on one platform. You’ll get a single source of the truth for customer, order and inventory data in real-time, making that data available to all existing and future front-end, customer-facing systems.
Establish your digital platform
With your foundation in place, you can seamlessly connect more modern and advanced channels within any part of your business. An ecommerce platform will serve as the base of your digital platform. Unified with your back-end systems, you’ll provide instant access to inventory and customer data to your web store to display accurate inventory levels to shoppers, including store availability, and deliver relevant cross-sell and upsell merchandising offers.
Extend digital to the store and beyond
Unify your online and offline channels by extending your digital platform to support a modern Point of Sale system (POS). Your POS will now operate on the same digital platform as your ecommerce system, creating a seamless experience between online and offline. The shopping journey can start in one channel and easily transition to another. Sales associates can quickly leverage customer, inventory and product data for effective, in-store experiences. Other channels, including pop-up stores, catalogs, call centers and kiosks will also connect seamlessly to the back-end, allowing shoppers to truly buy anywhere, return anywhere.
Maximize engagement and innovation
Design innovative customer acquisition and retention experiences with your ecommerce and POS systems, utilizing your single source of customer, order and inventory data. With a central digital communications hub, provide personalized engagements and marketing campaigns designed to motivate customers and deliver exceptional experiences at every touchpoint, focusing on relevancy and value throughout the customer life cycle.
Drive market disruption.
No longer limited by technology, digitally disrupt your industry and transform your business. You’ll streamline your operations and end the never-ending cycle of maintaining legacy, back-office IT systems and siloed, channel-specific software. From there, you’ll gain the agility and scalability to grow your business. Company resources previously dedicated to maintaining multiple systems with heavy integrations can be refocused to innovating the customer experience over and over.
Your New Customer Experience
With a unified commerce platform in place, technology is no longer a limiting factor. Delivering the ultimate customer experience arrives when you no longer depend on technology providers to help you create and engage in new, disruptive ways. Businesses can take disruption into their own hands.
With the single source of truth, you’ll provide consistent and relevant experiences across all customer touchpoints and sales channels to differentiate your brand by seamlessly moving with your customers from their desktop, to their smartphone, to your stores and to your call center. You’ll also provide shoppers with relevant, timely and personalized engagements. Altogether, you’ll give customers what they expect from a brand experience, gain their loyalty and be rewarded with their repeat purchases.
Watch the on-demand webinar
Click here (opens in new tab) to listen to the on-demand webinar and demo where Matthew Rhodus, NetSuite’s Director and Industry Principal discusses NetSuite’s 5-step strategy designed specifically for fashion brands to overcome top technology inhibitors that impede customer experience.