Mens Et Opera - Reloaded

For readers who might be interested, I thought it would be useful to gather together in one place links to various posts on Omnichannel and customer-centricity. On to the posts. It's the customer, stupid! The "relational gap" in the Australian Retail sector  The misleading Omnichannel...thing Business as a Calling: How Catchoftheday and Tinyme fulfill their call Omnichannel doesn't necessarily mean customer happiness Does Product-Centricity conflic with Customer-Centricity? Drop Shipping: the competitive advantage of pure players over bricks and mortar What's customer experience, anyway? "The Company is like a verb whose subject is the customer" Enjoy!

The cost of waiting to invest in PIM is too great. Please pause and repeat it to yourself. This is not a joke. Let's face it. If you are a retailer (small or big makes little difference), what are your most painful challenges? Chances are that your answer will include a variation of the following: lost sales from out-of-stocks,  lost time haggling over return disputes,  squandering hours reconciling product promotion discrepancies across all channels. Feel free to continue to experience wasted dollars from slowed time to market for new product introductions, time spent relaying basic product information to customers and partners, and brand erosion. However, if you have embarked on the journey for redemption :-), I suggest to keep on reading. But let me firstly demystify what PIM is...just to lay good foundations (also check here , here , and here for further qualification of what PIM really  is). Now, my top reasons why you ought to consider transforming...

Interesting article in Forbes titled " Retail in Crisis: "These are the changes brick-and-mortar stores must take ". It is a guest post by Brian K. Walker, VP at Hybris. I knew this article was fun to read. I really like it and I think Brian hammers home many points. The one I love is his bashing of the omnichannel concept (he wouldn't say that he was engaged in a bashing exercise though :-).  I recently blogged on a related topic: It's the customer, stupid! . Two excerpts that resonate greatly. The problem is that the term “omnichannel” still contains the word “channel.” For many retailers this means trying to slide by with in-store pick-up of online orders, or taking returns in-store of orders customers placed via the Web. However, the business case extends well beyond these tactical initiatives to satisfy basic customer needs—increasing the lifetime value of customers, delivering faster inventory turns in-store and creating higher margins through red...

The digital age is here to stay and it’s making our world more hybrid than ever.  The line between digital and physical are being blurred by technology. After almost a couple of decades, you’d think that online would have relegated to the store to a secondary experience.  That’s not the case, not by a long shot.  Online AND Offline Granted, since its inception, eCommerce sales growth has been heady and will continue to be. However, the same technology that permits such success is transforming bricks and mortars inside out. To understand this, you need look no further than Burberry stores, whose retail model is becoming a gold standard for fashion retailers. To illustrate: clothing in the store is embedded with chips which can be read by screens and mirrors using radio-frequency identification technology. When a customer walks into a changing room holding a jacket, one of the mirrors might respond by turning into a screen showing images of how it was worn on the cat...