The explosion of the 4.0 industry has had a substantial impact on customers' buying tendencies. Omnichannel sales bring high efficiency to the business. However, the practical evaluation and careful management of each channel is an issue that many units consider. So what is the most effective omnichannel sales management strategy? The Navigos Search's article below will answer this problem!
1. What is Omnichannel sales?
Omnichannel sales is a form of customer marketing on many channels, from online to offline. With this model, you will attract many prospective customers by creating various purchasing methods. In particular, online sales platforms are the goal that many leaders want to aim for in their unit's omnichannel sales model.
Instead of consuming human resources and management costs on each channel, with an omnichannel sales solution, you will easily manage retail store chains, manage all products, customer service, follow the shipping process, control inventory and employees, suppliers, etc. on multiple platforms at the same time.
Omnichannel sales is a current tendency
2. The current omnichannel sales tendency
Currently, customers are wiser and wiser when learning about products and purchasing decisions. They can research the outcome in advance at many different stores to check the quality, design, etc., ordering online is the final step. On the contrary, instead of having to go to stores to get information about products, they bring benefits to users as well as the development of business units.
However, with the explosion of the Internet, buying and selling online is becoming more popular. You do not consume a large amount of capital to rent a business location or build a store system, but only a few million dong. You can also start an online business. When approaching omnichannel sales, you will easily build a target customer portrait, approach and find many other suitable customers for your business.
3. The difficulties of Omnichannel sales
Inventory control
When expanding more channels, you must have a large number of goods available to serve business demand. The more channels, the higher the accuracy requirements in product control. It is necessary to strictly control the products that are selling well and are in stock to quickly make decisions to add or release inventory.
At this time, if the omnichannel sales process is not scientifically established, it will lead to messy, lost, redundant goods, ... making business activities more difficult to control.
Difficulties in products focusing on management
The application of omnichannel sales means that orders will arise from many different sources. And without strict control, goods are easily mistaken, omitted, wrong orders, .... Therefore, you must make statistics, control and closely monitor customer transaction activities on a synchronous system. In addition, there is a solution to integrate and update the products sold that are linked between the exchanges. From there, the problem of goods control will become more favorable.
Omnichannel sales create difficulties in products focusing management
Time and human management consuming
When opening more business channels, you must have a significant human resource to operate the work. Managing the number of employees working on channels such as fanpage, websites, e-commerce platforms, ... at the same time is more and more difficult. This requires leaders to have a strategy to manage all employees' activities closely.
In addition, online and in-store employees will compete with each other for personal benefits. Indeed, not all employees tend to work as a team to provide the best customer experience. These things make senior managers not only consume time but also cost money to effectively manage human resources.
4. Why should we implement Omnichannel sales?
Most stores and business units now implement omnichannel sales because this method brings many benefits:
Enhance and synchronize customer experience
Omnichannel sales is the perfect solution, capable of meeting different consumer buying stages. All channels are synchronized and operated on a single system. Therefore, from the time customers start learning to use the brand, the product will be guaranteed to be consistent and seamless.
In other words, whether customers have known you through online channels or a store address, buying online or using directly will receive the same experience in terms of quality, style and service attitude and service.
Boosting revenue growth
When applying omnichannel sales, your brand will have expanded coverage and increased awareness on all sales "fronts". From there, the number of customers accessing your products is also larger. This strongly impacts buying psychology, motivating customers to buy more and forming a loyal customer base. And indeed, your unit's revenue will grow steadily and sustainably.
Omnichannel sales help to boost revenue growth
Understand and service customer’s quality
Omnichannel selling allows business units to collect all the necessary information and customer habits. Thereby, you can completely sketch out the portrait of your target customer to build a more effective and correct marketing strategy.
Moreover, information about purchase history will help you study the preferences and buying psychology of users. What products do they usually focus on? What is the best-selling item when selling online? How much does the value of each online and offline order fluctuate? This is the most valuable data for you to adjust your business plan effectively in the future.
5. The effective omnichannel sales management
Building a zero-stop omnichannel experience
When you come to the idea of developing omnichannel ecommerce, don't just aim to build and expand the fastest selling channels. To ensure the effectiveness of each channel, business units should determine a more "worth-for-money" goal, which is to form a system of sale channels (online and offline) that are linked and coordinated with each other. The smoother and more enjoyable an omnichannel experience is, the more emotionally persuasive to buy.
Optimizing and automating customer service
Approaching the customers
On the market, there are many sales tools that businesses can apply to build a fully automated process of approaching and "following" customers: Messenger, Email, SMS, Zalo, Web Push, …
This system helps brands approach customers more proactively. However, you must ensure the information and content is attractive by offering promotions, winning mini-games, ... at the right time.
Besides, most of the above tools also come with a customer action tracking system on online sales channels, especially websites. And this is an effective assistant to help managers analyze customer portraits most clearly.
Optimizing and automating approach customers
Customer Service
“Chatbot” is a popular keyword when mentioning customer care issues. A chatbot is software used to manage a text or text-to-speech online discussion system, instead of providing a face-to-face discussion with the user. This is considered the leading e-commerce solution for businesses in today's competitive market.
In terms of investment costs, you have to hire 2-3 more employees with a salary of 10 million / month to do jobs such as online fanpage, online consulting, etc. Chatbots are much more economical because you invest in one-time construction that can be applied for a long time, without training costs, and always ensure 24/7 customer care.
In terms of quality, chatbots are much more modern because they have applied the most modern technologies such as AI (artificial intelligence), Machine Learning, Big Data, etc. to optimize customer care activities with interactive scenarios that have more depth, complexity.
Moreover, chatbot is no longer limited to only being applied to each individual channel, but has been applied on many channels such as: Chatbot live chat website, Chatbot social network, Callbot... In addition, Chatbot's new technology also allows it to centralize all customer messages at one point. This both reduces management effort and increases the ability to track customers on the omnichannel system.
Building omnichannel sales management system
Data management and business reporting help businesses streamline and optimize performance by applying automation tools. Today, many unified e-commerce platforms support businesses in synchronizing data, including orders, product introduction information, consumption, inventory, revenue, etc., between multiple channels and the management system. At the same time, these platforms also centralize data into one warehouse to ensure that administration, processing, information storage, data reporting, etc. are displayed and operated in a single place.
In particular, the prominent platforms are BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Shopify,... These tools do not simply help businesses eliminate wasted time and effort for activities such as uploading content to websites, channels, statistics, regular data reports, ... but also ensures administrators always keep a close eye on the business situation of the entire system. From there, it is easy to detect problems and risks that arise in the shortest time to come up with a proper plan promptly.
Building and developing omnichannel sales system
Hopefully, through this, you have got the proper omnichannel sales management solution for your unit to avoid the business situation "stagnant" and improve revenue efficiency. There are many other useful articles for businesses by industry on Navigossearch.com. Don't miss it!
Meet the Southern headhunter team here!
Meet the Northern headhunter team here!
Navigos Search - Vietnam's leading middle and high-level talent hunting company