The educated, well connected and digital savvy consumers of today are revolutionising the retail landscape. Some of the various expectations they have involves convenience, quickness and a smooth and seamless experience whether they are shopping through brick and mortar or online. Along with this, the jewellery retailers’ tussle to track their customers and how they interact with the brand has brought them to realise that it is now critical to acclimate their businesses for a multi-touchpoint consumer journey.

 

Below, we have identified 7 major challenges faced by jewellery retailers in their pursuit of setting up omni-channel retail and how to conquer them. 

 

 

If you are a retailer who is guilty of using the same system for more than past 20 years, then you are jeopardising the chances of your own success. It’s a fact that many existing retailers today deploy architecture, infrastructure and applications that are outmoded and thus, the technology remains far from keeping up with the shopping habits of today’s consumer, nor can it positively affect your business growth plans be it geographic expansion or creating new brands. 

 

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Investing in a firmly integrated solution and embedding it into your retail business environs and application systems.  The precision that comes with real-time technology and a centralized database is not only beneficial to operations but to your associates and customers too.

 

 

 

Many of the jewellery retailers currently have systems that were originally designed for a single channel. This implies that the data for each channel is stored in a different database or a different server altogether. With the nature of consumers becoming more demanding, retailers cannot afford to continue with siloed information for each business point.  

 

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Having a system in place that singly connects all your applications - jewellery e-commerce website, back office, retail POS and manufacturing for consistency of data across channels. Following are examples of the activities that jewellery retailers can execute with an integrated system:-

 

It is vital that at any given point, there must be only one view of the truth. 

 

 

Customers today want retailers to keep accurate records of when and where they have interacted with them. With siloed systems, what usually happens is that the information recorded in one channel (e.g. in-store POS) only shows a snapshot of the customer’s profile as it doesn’t bring into consideration other channels that may have been used like e-commerce, mobile app etc.  

 

 

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Having a solution installed that provides retailers with a 360° view of a customer to ensure a personalised experience to your valued customers at every channel. Minute details about the customer like complete purchase history, contact info, preferences and wish-lists, lifestyle, browsing history and customer service interactions should remain accessible to the sales associates on the floor and also at the head office so that the customer can be effectively served throughout his decision making journey. If you fail to establish one-on-one relationships with customers, you may underperform and may even lose customer base by failing to optimise your business channels. 

 

 

Various jewellery retailers are using separate systems to manage the inventory in stores, web orders and in the manufacturing unit. This, as in challenge #3, results into an incomplete view of total inventory across business channels. Due to this, retailers are bound to lose sales, have stock outs and over-stock issues and generally lack inventory control. 

 

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Investing in jewellery inventory software with an apt technology that operates via a central repository system to view and manage inventory at all selling points. You can achieve rapid ROI by freeing associates from the back-office tasks and having them spend more time on the selling floor. You must well equip them to execute receiving, transfers and physical inventory from anywhere.  Consumers today expect retailers to lookup their inventory directly from the store and be able to offer varied options of fulfilment.

 

 

Retailers know the significance of collecting and recording details related to transactions, products, customer profiles and social data; however, many are even to date, manually compiling business acumen from across channels.

 

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Accessing insights from all business applications at once by investing in a solution with embedded analytics and business intelligence.  To help retailers make tactical and operational decisions for the business a platform should be set up for both transactional and analytical reporting across enterprise.

 

Customer information collected via each interaction should be centralised.

 

This will provide retailers with valuable insight to improve future interactions and the customer experience holistically. 

 

 

We live in a high-tech world and yet, many retailers are still deploying pen and paper and other traditional methods either for management of customer orders, store receiving and transfers, etc. 

 

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Assimilating every bit of your omni-channel requirement with a centralised solution for orders and inventory management. This transition will offer a great chance to retailers in order to analyse and standardize the in-house practices across channels. It will also help to minimise costs by mechanising processes which will in turn result into much lesser errors, the customer satisfaction will spike along with saving a significant amount of time in the order fulfilling process. 

 

 

The modern consumer has information at his fingertips. They can easily access information like reviews, competitive prices etc. and thus it is common for a consumer to know more about a product than the store associates. It happens so that the sales associate has to leave the customer’s side to get more information on a product. This not only drives customers to use their mobile phones instead of engaging with the associate for future needs, but chances are that you may lose them to your competitors. 

 

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Arming store associates with mobile technology and up-to-the-minute tools and techniques so that they can perform their tasks adeptly by engaging in chart-topping practices and providing outstanding customer service. Even though there are various ways to digitize your store, arming store associates with mobile devices ensures that they remain by the customer’s side throughout. Some of the prised mobile technologies worth considering would include inventory lookup, product browsing, mobile transactions and handy detailed customer information e.g. purchase history, preferences and wish lists. Customer store experience, services rendered, and store associate training are the key to increase traffic, conversions, average transaction value and gross margin.

 

As a jewellery retailer, it is important to be agile and acclimate yourself to the changes that are taking place in the retail environment. Buyers are now well aware of the market and leading the way. All you must do is keep up with the pace of the industry, reduce errors and increase productivity, make customers happy, increase revenue and innovate to avoid sabotaging the growth of your business.

 

Diamond Technology Solutions is your experienced technology partner and can help you conquer these challenges to omni-channel retailing.