The ability to deliver a unified and personalized customer experience across channels and from order capture to delivery is front and center for retailers. Retail executives realize that consumers’ desire for a seamless shopping experience and today’s convergence of physical and digital shopping environments requires a unified commerce platform.
According to enVista’s 2020 Customer Engagement Survey, 95 percent of retailers are planning to have a single commerce platform implemented within three years. While 63 percent of retailers have implemented a unified commerce platform, two-thirds of those retailers indicate their system needs improvement.
enVista CEO Jim Barnes said, “Retailers are focused on unifying commerce to drive profitability, customer service and competitive advantage; however, it is easier said than done. Successful unified commerce implementations require a platform with a common data model that delivers a single enterprise version of customer data, key item attributes, inventory, order and fulfillment allocation, pricing and payment.”
Offering a consistent brand experience and providing customers the ability to securely and holistically shop across channels is vital. According to enVista’s recent Consumer Study, consumers expect a unified shopping experience as validated by these findings:
- 72% are likely to choose a brand that offers the ability to purchase/return across channels
- 51% are likely to shop at a retailer that allows them to have a shared cart across channels
- 65% indicate that the ability to buy anywhere, ship anywhere is a critical factor in choosing where to shop.
enVista’s Senior Vice President of Retail Gene Bornac said, “Customers are consistently voting with their dollars for retailers who provide a frictionless, unified, purchase, delivery and return experience. The winners in the retail competition for customers’ share of wallet succeed by unifying the entire shopping experience through alignment of the organization, processes and technology to support customer expectations.”
The 2020 Customer Engagement Survey of U.S. retailers offers insights into retailer priorities and initiatives, including an understanding of current and future customer behavior, and highlights the contrast between retailer capabilities and consumer expectations. This survey builds on the history of 20 years of research into retailer priorities through the industry-leading annual POS/Customer Engagement Benchmarking Survey initially launched at LakeWest Group, continued at BRP Consulting, and now available exclusively at enVista.
The 2020 Customer Engagement Survey report is available for download at:
https://www.envistacorp.com/2020-customer-engagement-survey/
enVista’s agile Unified Commerce Platform, strategically built from the ground up as microservices architecture on a common data model and integration framework, helps retailers rapidly unify commerce and improve customer engagement and profitability.
enVista’s Retail Consulting Services include: Retail Strategy, Unified Commerce, Order Management Systems (OMS), Customer Engagement and Journey Mapping, Digital Commerce, Inventory Management, Merchandising (planning, forecasting, allocation, etc.), Product Lifecycle Management, Business Intelligence (BI), Store Operations, Business Process and Change Management, Supply Chain Strategy and Network Optimization.
