New Gartner research reveals 3 keys to Unified Commerce

Unified Commerce can be daunting.

For one, customers demand consistent, unified experiences from retailers. But there's no longer such thing as a consistent experience. Instead, retailers must compose a cohesive experience for each customer from an ever-growing list of sales channels, touchpoints, expectations and more.

Add the inherent complexity that these demands place on the retailers' back-end systems, plus the sheer scale of omnichannel retail, and Unified Commerce can even seem insurmountable.

That is hardly the case.

The transition to Unified Commerce is intensive. However, it's also well worth your efforts. Unified Commerce integrates a retailer's back-end systems with their sales channels to create a holistic shopping experience where processes run faster and more efficiently, channels become more profitable and capable, and organizations become more agile and resilient.

The latest Gartner® research can show you how. In their recent report, "Deliver a Unified Retail Experience Using 3 Top Practices" they share how retailers can drive Unified Commerce transformation by honing in on customer-facing processes, shaping back-end systems to drive experiences and adapting to change by leveraging real-time inventory data.

Here are three key takeaways from the report.

Customer engagement falls into four fundamental behaviors

Customer journeys are fragmenting and diverging.

Gone are the days of a linear customer experience. Today, customers demand retailers mold experiences to their specific preferences at their specific pace. This can quickly compound into a seemingly unpredictable, unwieldy and sometimes contradictory set of expectations.

Unified Commerce brings order to that chaos. As a fundamentally composable solution, Unified Commerce gives retailers the flexibility and agility to craft unique customer-centric experiences without losing sight of their universal brand promise. It achieves this by treating each pattern of behavior as its own module of experience, then orchestrating them as each customer progresses through their journey.

Gartner distills these patterns into four major customer processes:

• Browse: how customers find what they want and discover new products or services
• Transact: how customers buy and return products across each of your sales channels
• Acquire: how customers receive their purchases, with an emphasis on omnichannel fulfillment
• Consume: how customers engage with your products, brand and touchpoints

Customers may go through one or more of these processes on any given channel at any given time.

These four processes create a framework for cataloging individual customer behaviors. From here, retailers can identify what those behaviors look like, then enhance their enterprise accordingly.

Back-end systems must be designed for customer behavior

Omnichannel delivered on its promise to make the experience of browsing, transacting, acquiring and consuming seamless. However, omnichannel focuses exclusively on the front-end.

It does not factor in technology, infrastructure and back-end systems. Omnichannel-enabled organizations that have yet to take the next step into Unified Commerce often struggle with siloed data and operations, inefficient processes and expensive or inefficient tech stacks. These retailers often see their front-end efforts become futile as they create drastically more complexity under the surface.

Worse, these inefficiencies inevitably interfere with the front-end customer experience, undermining efforts to convey a unified retail brand.

Unified Commerce solves this. As omnichannel evolves, it aligns retailers' front-end sales channels with their systems, products, interactions and data to simplify and elevate the entire retail experience, for customers and enterprises alike. But most importantly, it gives retailers the flexibility to adapt now and in the future.

But to do so successfully, retailers must know exactly how their customers browse, transact, acquire and consume. Gartner found Customer Behavior Analysis, a blend of qualitative and quantitative consumer research, to be a powerful tool for discovering these behavioral patterns.

According to their research, retailers can use these insights to create more adaptable, profitable and customer-centric systems design decisions. Gartner's report outlines how to conduct a Customer Behavior Analysis as well as its benefits and applications.

Real-time data is the key to unlocking a unified enterprise

Each sales channel and customer touch point produce a wealth of actionable data.

However, traditional retail approaches and legacy technology get in the way, slowing down and siloing data past the point of usability. Without the right solutions in place, even an otherwise modern retailer can find themselves buried under the volume and velocity of new data.

Unified Commerce simplifies the flow of omnichannel data and puts the right information in the right hands at the right time. Solutions gather data from every source perpetually, aggregate it into a single point of truth and share it across the organization as close to real-time as possible.

While technology makes real-time data flow achievable, retailers must take steps early on to ensure it happens efficiently and effectively. Gartner uncovered four steps to doing so:

1. Reorganize business structures to enable faster data sharing across the enterprise
2. Improve data feeds into automated systems
3. Follow best practices to identify, manage and protect master data
4. Make clean inventory data visible for both the enterprise and customers

Data fuels the successful, customer-centric retail enterprise. These steps, richly detailed in the report, help retailers unlock real-time data and bring it to light.

Learn the leading practices of Unified Commerce

Unified Commerce is one of the most critical concepts in retail today.

The last several years have presented unprecedented challenges to the retail market. Customer-centric experiences and agility have become the key differentiators between the retail brands that can succeed in these conditions versus those that will fall behind.

Built on the foundation of customer experience and organizational agility, Unified Commerce is the answer to a retail market rife with uncertainty and complexity.

The findings presented in Gartner's report give retailers the focus and direction they need to elevate their enterprise with Unified Commerce. And to effectively unify the front- and back-ends of their organization around what matters most: your customers.