Deloitte's Xmas Retail Survey 2008

Just spotted Deloitte's related paper to their annual Christmas survey; 'Multichannel retailing - every cloud has a silver lining'.

It's a succinct read and I'm sure only touches the surface of the survey results. In reading it, I felt a level of vindication for my earlier posting about the need for CRM. The survey results would indicate that retailers do see the need for a CRM as an enabler to consumer x-channel behaviour - great news!

Interestingly, joint top of the key challenges faced to becoming a true multichannel retailer is 'Inflexible organisation structures and processes that are based on channel and not brand' at 41%, but 'Implementing the required cultural shift and changes to measures and incentives' was last at 9%. Surely these should be of joint importance, the latter going some way to address the former? I may not be an organisational change expert, but laying out some incentives to encourage behavioural change is a good step in the right direction for getting organisational change accepted.

Does Multichannel retailing need a re-brand to Cross-channel?

Over the past few months I've noticed the increasing use of the phrase "Cross-channel" replacing "multichannel" in presentations, whitepapers and blogs by various industry commentators and consultancies.

However this doesn't come as any surprise to me, as back in February when I posted a question on LinkedIn Q&A asking about the challenges of becoming truly multichannel, I received an interesting response.

Satindra Chakravorty believed, even back then, that we needed to decommission the phrase multichannel as it did not convey what the customer does or what's required by the retailer to enable the customer journey across channels. In fact, his view that any organisation that considered its processes as multichannel also would have the notion of boundaries between those channels. My view is that if this is the case, those espousing they are multichannel haven't really understood what it's about.

Maybe the marketing teams at these consultancies have decided that a rebranding exercise is required, though I can't help but think that maybe if they'd got the message and scope of impact right first time around we wouldn't be needing Multichannel 2.0 aka Cross-channel now.

Either way, whatever you call it the key challenge is moving from purely a product and sales centric to customer-centric retailer and overcoming the obstacles of people, process and technology that accompany all such transformations.