To succeed in the fast-paced world of omni-channel commerce, it is essential that retailers pay attention to the demands and expectations of their customers. By integrating and streamlining your customer and order management systems, you can improve service response times, create better targeted messaging, and drive conversions from satisfied and returning customers.
Integrating customer management systems provides you with a central source of information, saving time for customer service representatives and others accessing the system, and money from having to purchase multiple programs to oversee your system.
A streamlined system provides:
- comprehensive order management information for customer service purposes
- serves as a supermaster for inventory – allowing for easier omni-channel fulfillment
- a single source for customer data for analysis
Order Management & Customer Service
Research indicates that customers prefer a quality response to service inquiries over a quick one. By storing customer and order information in one place, your customer service representatives can quickly access all the data needed to provide both accurate and quick responses to customer inquiries:
- order date and information
- backorder or pre-order status
- tracking information
- customer purchase history and returns
- inventory levels
An integrated order/customer management system also allows you to adjust orders based on customer requests – add items, update quantities, process cancellations and re-orders, create recurring orders. Moreover, you can provide customized shipping solutions to meet customer demands – split orders, drop shipping, expedited, delayed shipments, ship-to-store. The most adaptable integrated systems offer tools for customers to make adjustments themselves (within a limited time-frame), empowering customers to meet their own service needs.
Inventory Management & Omni-Channel Delivery
Having a supermaster for inventory that functions as a trusted source of inventory data across your company ensures consistent and accurate information about stock availability for everyone using your platform. Rather than have distinct systems that oversee warehouse, retail, or supply chains, respectively, a single, enterprise view of inventory allows near-real-time reporting of stock levels.
Image: Forrester Research
Real-time inventory reporting also ensures that customers can purchase – or pre-order – available merchandise, regardless of where it may be located within your system. Integrated inventory management empowers sales associates to complete transactions based on actual inventory in your system, rather than just what may be listed in a POS or retail merchandising system which might not account for warehouse stock or incoming items. As customers increasingly shop across channels, it is important that retailers have accurate inventory information at each touchpoint to ensure the browsing customer follows through and completes the sale.
Customer Data Analysis
Having a single source for all customer data makes it easy to analyze data to identify trends and make informed marketing decisions. It allows you to:
- offer effective promotional targeting
- retarget and convert abandoned shopping carts
- better understand customer browsing behavior
- test real-time promotional offers
The better you understand your customer habits, the more effective and competitive you can be. Integrating your customer data and order systems make it easier and more cost-effective to analyze the information you already have and make the most of it going forward.
The Upshot Commerce platform offers all the tools you need to effectively integrate your customer data, order management, and inventory systems. Streamline your inventory, provide essential details for your support team, and ensure that your customers get the information they need as soon as they think to ask for it.