The Order Management Challenge in an Omnichannel World – How (and Why) to Win!
As the demand for omnichannel commerce surges, retailers find themselves struggling to streamline operations across the order management lifecycle. Optimizing order fulfillment, improving inventory visibility, and accelerating the order orchestration process are just some of the challenges they face in an era of varied payment, shipping, and delivery options. Read on to learn how and why you can overcome the order management challenge in an omnichannel world!
Order Management Challenges – An Overview
According to Jeff Bezos, the only sustainable advantage you can have over others is agility. And we couldn’t agree more! Today’s customers don’t just want responsive experiences; they want extremely adaptive ones too. This makes streamlining and standardizing the order management process critical to business success.
Yet, the many order management challenges make turning this dream into reality a backbreaking exercise, including:
- Architecting and integrating data from varied sources to get a unified view in real-time across the entire spectrum
- Having a centralized information repository that combines activities of different sales channels with demand planning, inventory management, and last-mile distribution
- Fulfilling and processing orders in the right manner and at the right place and right time
- Efficiently catering to different payment and delivery demands of customers for orders placed from different devices and locations
- Curating personalized content and campaigns for customers with different needs and at different stages of the purchasing journey
Winning at Order Management – A Recipe for Success
In today’s dynamic world, inefficient order management can impact the overall business outcomes in several ways, including delayed shipments, poor replenishment, stock-outs (or overstocking), high operating costs, and, ultimately, disappointed customers.
If you want to deliver the best customer experiences, you need to cater to their evolving needs, regardless of the device they are using and the channel they are on.
Meeting customers where they are in the purchasing journey and offering tailored products and marketing messages goes a long way in enhancing loyalty, boosting retention, and improving customer lifetime value. In the long run, such relentless focus on customer experience translates into higher conversions, better revenue, and higher average order values.
Let’s take an example. Imagine a customer walks into your retail store and likes an item. Unfortunately, that item is out of stock, which erases any chance of a conversion. If you want to fulfill this specific need, you must be able to present an alternative. In this case, offering the customer an option to immediately place an order via a mobile device (or an in-store kiosk) and have the product delivered home (or picked up from a location of choice) would be ideal.
Streamlining Order Management – The Ignitiv Way
Traditional order management systems fail to support omnichannel operations with numerous delivery and payment options. Instead, they focus on a single channel with limited inventory visibility. In the era when sales channels were limited, these systems offered all the capabilities needed to drive conversions. But as the number (and complexity) of sales channels grow, there is an urgent need to embrace new ways of tackling the order management process.
At Ignitiv, we help in the implementation of distributed order management solutions to help streamline the shipment and delivery of products on time and within budget. Simultaneously, we enable much-needed supply chain integrations, so different departments can operate together and not in silos.
Via future-proof and scalable implementations and integrations, we can help:
Improve Your Marketing ROI
With Ignitiv, you can have data from every customer interaction across multiple channels at your fingertips. Access to such data allows you to address customer issues even before they impact the experience. We combine all this data with market-leading analytics tools, allowing you to be driven by real-time actionable customer intelligence. By taking care of routine order management activities across different channels, we help you focus on building a strong relationship with your customers and serving them with your best offerings.
Minimize the Probability of Lost Sales
Investing in distributed inventory and order management solutions can result in lesser lost sales. By achieving end-to-end visibility into inventory across distribution centers, stores, suppliers, and logistic partners, you can boost your ability to deliver the products your customers need at the right place and right time. Such visibility can also help you better allocate and replenish inventory in a centralized manner and help you receive, transfer, and return inventory across channels.
Optimally Serve the Needs of Customers
Seamless omnichannel integration also plays a huge role in optimally serving the needs of your customers. Collecting information from multiple sources into a centralized platform allows you to orchestrate the ideal dispatch plans instead of relying on data from a single sales channel. By designing all channels, customer touchpoints, and functional processes and keeping customer needs in mind, you can enable the right experiences around customer transactions, service interactions, and social data.
Adapting to evolving e-commerce trends and volatile market conditions demands new ways of engaging with customers. Since today’s customers have no patience for clunky and inconvenient omnichannel experiences, it’s time to curate strategies that address their unique requirements across devices, channels, and touchpoints.
Strategy, Technology, and Design – Here’s How Ignitiv Can Help
If you want to delight customers across different sales channels, you must ensure consistency all through. To lead the experience economy, you need the right mix of strategy, technology, and design to overcome common order management challenges and deliver transformative experiences for your customers.
Learn how Ignitiv can take your business to greater heights by maximizing the value generated from each stage of the customer journey. Contact us to learn more about our solutions that help streamline and standardize the order management process.
