Today’s multichannel world grows more complex daily. Whether your orders are captured through traditional or online retail, call centers, IVRs or affiliates, having the right applications in place are critical to the growth of your organization, sales team performance and to customer loyalty. A closely coupled CRM and order management system (OMS) is a cornerstone to building a solid foundation for your retail business.
Multichannel marketing allows a business more opportunities to interact with its customers and each channel can also help to promote the other channels. Because website and phone-in mail orders collect information about the customer that a brick-and-mortar retail sale might not, these channels make it possible to develop customer lists for future promotions and branding campaigns – and to understand customer channel preference. The intent of CRM solutions is to keep in touch with your customers and keep them engaged with your brand – answering questions, building the customer relationship and providing incentive-based reasons for them to remain a loyal and frequent customer.
As a result, CRM has become a multichannel discipline and savvy retailers recognize that they need to bond with their customers through whatever mix of channels their customers use and prefer.
Equally important is a customer service solution that gives you the ability to monitor, manage and quickly adjust all of the key aspects of the multichannel sales process – including scripts, offers, continuity, discounts, up sells, cross-sells, and other elements of customer satisfaction, all in real time. This will allow you to maximize average order value, increase media efficiency ratios (MER), and generate exceptional sales and campaign results while at the same time increasing customer loyalty.
Whether you are a large company with sophisticated enterprise resource planning, accounting and CRM investments, or a smaller marketer experiencing high growth and looking to take the next step – integrating customer order information from your internal systems and external suppliers with existing CRM solutions will allow you to provide the best-of-breed customer service and sales performance.
Sotero Giftos is president and co-founder of OrderLogix, a provider of order management systems.
