We have witnessed a massive shift in the retail industry in the past few decades. We have seen retail stores evolving and expanding their reach via multiple channels. The only way to survive in this industry is to keep customers happy at all costs.
Retailers must provide an omnichannel service to the customers and deliver personalized services across all channels. A unified commerce solution implements advanced technologies like IoT or ML and software solutions such as CRM and POS. However, it is still difficult to make them collaborate.
Now, with changing times, businesses are making amends with their business processing. They are now inclining more towards using one platform for sales, systems, and applications while collecting data and extracting essential insights. This process is also known as unified commerce, and it is most likely to become the base for all businesses in the future.
What is Unified Commerce?
Earlier the commerce industry relied on the individual channels of sales. However, now most of them optimize an omnichannel commerce model. Despite having multiple benefits, this model is insufficient to cover every issue that retailers might encounter. Therefore, there is an emerging demand for unified commerce.
Unified commerce is a full-fledged software system that enables retailers to:
- Monitor each function of their business.
- View product and customer data via all touchpoints in real-time.
- Analyze data and turn them into actionable insights.
- Make data-driven and logical decisions.
- Proffer a personalized customer experience.
In simple words, you can get product data, customer insights, back-office management within the same platform.
The Major Aspects of a Unified Commerce
Given below are the main pillars of unified commerce: Sales, customer, software, and product.
Sales Channel
Different customers might prefer different channels to reach out to your product. Some might pick your website, third-party applications, or any other medium depending upon their choice. It makes the retailer even more accountable for providing an equally seamless experience across all the touchpoints. Whether browsing or purchasing products online or in-store, buyers must access the same chances: the view, the feel, promotions, and exceptional deals, and everything else must be the same. This is what we call consistency across all the channels.
Customer Interactions
The users who interact with your business using different channels via different devices must get a seamless shopping experience even from a different channel from the point they paused. For instance, if a buyer puts a product in the cart on your website, the next time they open the app, the cart items must be visible to them. This way they can continue shopping even after shifting to another channel.
When you keep tabs on your customer moves via all the channels, you can create personalized recommendations and make customers happy. As a result, your sales go up.
Software Systems
This concept even implies the integration of different systems on the same platform, such as ERP, CRM, SCM, CSM, POS, mobile apps, and other systems. Unified commerce ensures these systems are fully integrated and deliver impeccable services.
Product Information
The data addressing your services or products must be accurate and relevant across all the sales channels. Your customers and employees need to access the identical data of your services and products to avoid misunderstanding. Make sure the data is identical at all levels.
How Does It Provide a Seamless Shopping Experience?
Unified commerce opens doors to several benefits, and seamless customer interactions are one of them. But how does it do it? Given below are the factors that are responsible for providing seamless customer services:
Flexibility: It enables more flexibility for the customer. They can start, continue, finish, and cancel a product using their mobile phones or any other device they prefer. The buying journey has never been more flexible.
Interaction Recording: The system tracks every customer’s action; what they purchased, what they canceled, and what product they returned. The system tracks every interaction they have with your brand while allowing you to predict their next decisions.
Real-time Updates: Completely integrated channels make it possible for a real-time product or service updates while keeping your staff and customers aware of the availability.
Personalized Recommendations: Customer monitoring allows you to tailor recommendations for the customer.
How does Unified Commerce Benefit Your Business?
Apart from providing a seamless experience to the shoppers, this concept benefits your overall business with:
Automation: A centralized platform allows automation of most of the time-consuming manual tasks, which results in increased productivity of employees.
Effective Management: Unified commerce prevents almost all business barriers while ensuring 100% transparency of processes at all levels. Your staff is aware of all the updates in real-time hence allowing them to make the right decisions centering on delivery, marketing, inventory, and other business processes. You can also get rid of some general retail issues such as overstocking and understocking.
Lower Scope of Errors: Automation ensures accuracy of data drives the lower scope of errors as compared to those of manual management of different solutions. In addition, AI and ML-based predictive analysis help you predict and prevent issues.
Boost of Sales: All the above benefits mentioned above sum up to the boost of sales. With delighted customers, efficient management, accurate data, logical decisions, and fewer errors you can boost sales.
LS Retail is a unified commerce service provider. It delivers a set of tools ensuring impeccable business operations and incredible customer services. Trident Information Systems is a Gold Partner of LS Retail and Microsoft who has served numerous business ventures so far. For further information contact us.
