Whose Customer Is This?

All of us shop online and in stores. We are customers both of a retail brand’s eCommerce organization and of its store organization. Sometimes we buy online but, when we just can’t wait, collect in-store. Sometimes we return unwanted online purchases in the store, crossing an invisible border between the world of the eCommerce leader or chief digital officer and the world of the store operations executive.

Safety-First Versus Death Or Glory?

It’s hard for them to agree on the application they should use to deliver customer experience across their organizations. Store operations executives love reliability. They are the safety-first “Volvo buyers” of the software selection world. eCommerce leaders prefer excitement and a glimpse of glory.

Fortunately, a new generation of point-of-service (PoS) applications offers safety and excitement. Judiciously exploiting cloud and mobile distributes data and functionality for secure reliability. Coupling artificial-intelligence enterprise views of inventory and of the customer advances PoS from transaction to experience.

The Forrester Wave™: Point Of Service, Q3 2018

To help retailers make the right choice, Forrester evaluated the 13 most important vendors. We conducted in-depth executive interviews to understand how they use shared cross-channel pricing and promotion engines, enterprise views of inventory or customers, and personalized recommendations to deliver consistent compelling brand experience.

You can download the spreadsheet showing each vendors’ scores across 25 criteria. You can reweight the criteria and redraw the graphic to reflect your own priorities.