Leading commerce has been shaped by quick and efficient buying journeys. Buyers prefer to compare, experience, and self-serve: and they aren’t just on one channel or in one store. That’s why creating consistently high-quality buying experiences, across all touch-points, is critical for digital leading businesses.
66% of customers prefer to choose their own journey through a brand’s channels when making a purchase, and those customer journeys are rarely linear. A basic eCommerce transaction includes an average of 5.5 touch-points but can rack up as many as 20 as the customer compares, considers, and explores the factors relating to a purchase decision. (Source: Qualtrics.com)
In this blog, we’ll look at the reasons why data access is holding you back from delivering omnichannel experiences, and we’ll show you a new way to solve integration issues and fast forward your Omnichannel vision. It’s time to empower your digital team so they can connect your omnichannel experience with ease and deploy new experiences at lightning speed.
Why data access is the biggest roadblock to delivering Omnichannel customer experiences
Omnichannel commerce is about creating customer journeys that reflect fluidity between different online and offline channels and provide a seamless experience for the end-user regardless of where and how they contact a business or organization. It’s a practice that’s entirely user-focused.
The biggest challenge organizations face with building an Omnichannel experience is that data cannot flow seamlessly across channels in real-time, because the technology stack held is often dated and built-in silos. Systems have typically been purchased/built for a single purpose, meaning they contain data for a specific area, such as ERP for transactional and stock data, PIM for product information and CRM for customer data, etc.
These systems are built more for backend processes to create and store data, not to combine and activate the data in a frontend experience: it is in the latter where it creates the most business value, especially for customer experience.
You need these individual entities to support different business tasks/processes/teams, but your tech stack may be missing the additional software it needs to combine and activate the data across these systems, and because of this your Omnichannel experience is restricted by limited and locked in data.
Therefore, to create the experience you want in a new channel you typically need to rely heavily on your already over-burdened developer team, adding your latest request to the back of an already extensive task queue. At best, you’re looking at least 3-to-6 months before your project is underway, and for an ambitious CX leader in a competitive industry, the timeline is just too slow to stay ahead of competition and capture the most from your consumers.
There is an easier way to unlock your data, reduce reliance on your developers, and fuel multiple new Omnichannel experiences.
An Experience Data Platform serves as a data layer laid over the top of your existing data systems; It connects data from any backend system (ERP, PIM, CRM, etc) and makes these unique data sets instantly available through real-time APIs, for any frontend, channel, or device.
With purpose-built APIs, you can quickly begin to build new applications that scale globally in milliseconds and deliver an unrivalled omnichannel experience to your customers.
Using this type of software means digital teams can easily access all data from different systems in one place (e.g., customer data from CRM, product data from PIM, transactional data from ERP) and deliver selected data to any frontend experience without spending months on data integration.
Unleashing instant access to data and content that is connected across channels has been a game-changer for our omnichannel execution. We see great improvement in the customer experience and can deliver new initiatives faster. - Mattias Liljenberg, Head of E-commerce, MQ Marqet
With all your experience data in one place, you can easily combine the data and quickly build a new digital experience fit for any channel, which is instantly available on a global scale through purpose-built real-time APIs. As you can imagine, this has many benefits, four of them solving many headaches for retailers with omnichannel ambitions.
- Unlock universal data access
- Re-use and share data across channels
- Combine data to increase relevance in individual customer experiences
- Activate the data in real-time in any channel
Fuel your Omnichannel experience with Occtoo
Our Experience Data Platform is the answer omnichannel retailers have been looking for to overcome the data silo challenge. Give your digital team instant access to data and put team in the drivers seat! 