Multi-Channel Retailing
The Future...Has Arrived

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Retailers’ channels to market have traditionally developed with separate growth profiles and separate management structures, the core data that drives a true multi-channel strategy has been locked in a plethora of back-end systems, making it either too complex, too costly or just plain impossible to build a multichannel view of the customer, product and processes – until now.

Why is Multi-Channel Visibility so Important?

With the exception of a few giant and niche “pure” on-line players, every retailer is now a multi-channel operator with an increasing percentage of revenues coming from on-line sales and no sign of this on-line growth ending and the knowledge that things are only going to become more competitive in the future. As Alwyn Lewis, CEO of Sears Corporation stated in 2006:

“It took 60 years for Catalogue sales to become 7% of our business… and 5 years for on-line to become 9%. To win in the future, we have to rebuild our Corporate data warehouses around a single, seamless 360º view of our customers.”

In other words, multi-channel retailing puts business knowledge of individual customer activity – Store, on-line, loyalty card, catalogue, telephone, email and returns as the central foundation for profi ling, segmenting & targeting – allowing very refi ned and “relevant” marketing campaigns, delivering unprecedented Sales per unit of marketing spend – locking out competitors and building increasing customer intimacy.

The Multi-Channel “Super Shopper” Customer:

•	Customers who shop in store and on-line spend significantly more overall (averaging $600 more).
•	Multi-channel customers shop more frequently.
•	Multi-channel customers now represent 38% of all consumers.

Most retailers know that these Multi-channel “Super Shoppers” are critical to future success and are trying to do things with them:

•	Work out who they are within their own data and how to keep them.
•	Work out how to turn more of their existing customers into Super Shoppers.
•	Target competitors “Super Shoppers” and turn them into their own.

To reinforce the multi-channel objectives the following key points are highlighted from the Aberdeen Group white paper; The Multichannel Retail Benchmark Report: Where Is The True Multi-channel Retailer?

•	91% of the retailers that performed the highest in comparable in year on year sales use multiple channels to reach their customers.
•	Almost 80% of retailers say meeting customer expectations of seamless purchase delivery options across channels is the leading factor in integrating multi-channel initiatives.
•	53% of retailers say that multi-channel customers are more profitable than their single channel customers; yet integrating inventory and order management systems and the inability to share customer data across all channels are big impediments in creating that sea less customer multi-channel experience.

–Source: Aberdeen Group
The Multi-channel Retail Benchmark Report: Where Is The True Multi-channel Retailer?’

Site Intelligence and Business Objects: Delivering the multi-channel solution

Site Intelligence Visitor Behaviour Information System (VBIS) and Business Objects provide an easy to use and fl exible architecture for integrating multi-channel data together with intuitive, graphical data visualisation for fast executive level decision making.

We recognize the key drivers to achieving business value from Multi-channel retailing:

•	The need for standard visibility to maintain cross-channel consistency.
•	Development of a more customer-centric view of profi t and loss (P&L).
•	Institution of real-time inventory tracking solutions across all channels.
•	The capability to re-evaluate in-store space due to changing buying behaviours of multi-channel consumers.
•	Further retailer infrastructure investment to increase staffi ng and technology tools, in order to analyse and use effectively all the customer data across all channels.
•	The fact that new systems must work with existing data architectures.

The Site Intelligence Business Objects BI platform enables your existing retailing data to become accessible across the organization, allowing integration of disparate data sources, powerful querying of sophisticated data sets and ultimately, the extraction of Business Value in the form of detailed customer profi les, increasingly detailed customer segmentations and more comprehensive acquisition and conversion of multichannel customers.