The Consultancy take on Multichannel Retailing

After reading the article on the BT Global Services report, the subject of my last post, I decided to take a quick look at what the other consultancies were saying (or have said) about multichannel retailing.

Wipro http://www.wipro.com/ai/images/downloads/wp/IntegratedMulti_Channel_Retailing.pdf
Whilst I've worked with Wipro in the past and on both occasions came away slightly disillusioned, I have to say that this whitepaper is excellent. Though that's not just because their introduction has an almost identical definition for Multichannel Retailing as I used in my first blog post, but because they clearly define the benefits and challenges to implementing a multichannel operation. They highlight the added complexities of legacy systems in an established retailer, the governance issues in ensuring consistency across channels, the need for organisational alignment and the difficulties of getting store staff onboard with promoting cross channel shoppers. Of course the paper finishes by promoting the Wipro appraoch, but still a good high-level paper.


Javelin
Unfortunately, Javelin Group don't have a great deal to say about Multichannel out on the web apart from their brochureware. That's a shame, as I've worked with these guys and seen them influence and advise on both purely eCommerce strategy and cross channel.


Charteris
Back in late 2006 Charteris, a UK based IT consultancy, commissioned Martec to review the current state of multichannel retail in the UK. In early 2007 I was lucky enough to attend their breakfast briefing on the subject in which several well known UK retailers discussed the challenges of multi-channel retail. The report produced by Martec highlighted a couple of areas to me, the main being the lack of decent CRM processes across channels, followed by KPIs used to measure channel effectiveness. My view on the first point is that many retailers have yet to understand the wealth of customer data that is available to them from their web channel and therefore the need for an effective CRM platform to capitalise upon it. Not only that, but how they can merge that data with their other channels and external sources. The second point always amazes me, whilst many businesses produce business cases to justify a particular project, it very rarely contains any clear success criteria on which to base KPIs, e.g. level of customer retention/acquisition. Typically it's only ever about the first 5 year projections on the incremental revenues. 9 times out of ten, these KPIs are picked up in the reporting requirements that also seem to be the last thing the project team think about. Of course, Retailers aren't the only culprits here.


Conchango
Rizwan from Conchango, a business consultancy and systems integrator, has an excellent couple of blog postings. I think he sums up Multichannel and its challenges in his posting 'What is Multi-Channel?'. Working for one of those older traditional retailers, I totally agree with his observation regarding greater gains, but higher barrier to entry due to technology and organisational obstacles. In an organisation that has grown it's business units organically and traditionally autonomously with IT aligned to business unit, there are silos of organisation and technology which first need bridging and then replacing with joint technology and process - thankfully it's something that's been started here. Rizwan also mentions Service Orientation and this is something I want to go in to more detail about in a later posting. Service Orientation is a key concept to enable multichannel retailing, allowing individual services to be called upon from multiple channels to provide that single, consistent customer experience.

All in all, the consultancies appear to concur with the definition and points I raised in my first posting. In fact, many of them use a similar definition or at least some of the same terms!