Omni-Channel Customer Engagement Article

The promise of omni-channel customer engagement is obvious, but many firms are still a long way off from putting it into practice.

According to the Global Retail & Consumer Goods Survey, only 19 percent of top retailers are able to operate an omni-channel experience profitably.

Part of the problem is culture. Bringing together various departments to make omni-channel work requires a shift in thinking and a breakdown in the silos that separate the various divisions within a business. Without true collaboration, omni-channel doesn’t work.

Perhaps more challenging in the short term, many firms that could benefit from omni-channel customer engagement struggle with linking together their systems. Forrester (News - Alert) recently found that 40 percent of companies struggle to integrate the back-office applications that house their data.

For instance, a typical enterprise will have a point-of-sale system for physical stores. It will have an e-commerce platform for its web site. There might be data housed in a community-specific site that involves one of the firm’s brands. Then there might be data from live events, blogs, the contact center, etc.

Some of these data systems might connect, but many in the typical business won’t. This is a huge problem for omni-channel.

Two approaches currently in use are master data management systems that serve as the glue between various data systems. But often this is not enough.

Another approach is through virtualization. Customer identities are tied to specific data, but a virtualization layer above the real data represents the customer identity regardless of redundancies or inconsistencies.

The issues of silos and integration are not new, of course; businesses have struggled with this challenge for years. The cloud is starting to break down the silos, and application programmer interfaces (APIs) help. But as many businesses will tell you, there still is a long way to go even if the solution is in sight.

This is a problem for omni-channel. Few doubt its potential, but like virtual reality headsets, the expectations are still outpacing reality in many cases.