Holiday season 2020 has come to an end, so what now? Post-holiday season for retailers is a period of recovery centered around understanding what happened during the holiday and how to move forward with the transaction cycle, while also preparing for ongoing omnichannel business. The transaction cycle does not end after purchase, and successful retailers should ensure that their omnichannel systems and processes are able to seamlessly handle the recovery period that comes after the holidays. How well retailers are able to do this will determine their success in fostering unified commerce for a customer-centric business.
Post-Holiday Challenges
Omnichannel success always circles back to the customer centric philosophy — having a high level of real-time visibility and ensuring that products are in the right place at the right time to meet demand. In keeping this customer-centric philosophy after the holiday season, retailers will run into a few challenges that they must address to ensure success.
Physical inventory counts in distribution centers will be necessary in order to reacclimate to what is in stock and what needs to be replenished after a high-demand season. Additionally, there will be a wave of returns that will need to be properly managed and tracked in a way that promotes profitability and customer satisfaction. Finally, the first half of January brings an additional peak season for retailers as customers make their way online or into stores for gift card redemptions. All of these challenges comprise the part of the transaction cycle that comes after the original purchase.
Post-Holiday Omnichannel Success
There are two key factors of the shopping experience that will help promote retailer success after the holidays. One key is to create one integrated view of all inventory, customers and transactions, and the other is to create a frictionless returns process. Mastering systems integration and returns will send customer satisfaction and profitability soaring for your retail business.
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Fostering Systems Integration and Visibility
Having integrated systems will promote visibility throughout all processes of the retail business and will allow the retailer to keep the customer promise. Retailers should be able to have consistent, real-time visibility into all inventory throughout every channel, every customer profile and order history, as well as the business’ transaction history.
In monitoring and tracking transaction history, every stage of the transaction should be maintained. As was mentioned earlier, the transaction does not start when the customer enters the store, and it does not end when the customer makes the purchase. The entire transaction process includes the initial research stage, which often occurs online; the buying stage, which should be consistent online and in-store; the fulfillment stage, in which the retailer should be able to provide the customer with what they want, when and how they want it; and the return stage, which should be made as seamless as possible. Having systems that can provide visibility into all stages in an integrated way is critical to ensuring a positive customer experience and subsequent customer loyalty.
Creating a Frictionless Returns Process
Returns are inevitable after the holidays, but they do not have to tank any success that your retail business saw during peak season. In order to make sure that returns do not negatively impact profitability, your returns process should encourage and enable your customer to add more items onto his or her sale. This can be done by encouraging the customer to come into the store for a return, but add-ons should be enabled just as seamlessly in the digital store as well.
In addition to enabling a seamless add-on process for your customer, your brick-and-mortar and digital storefronts should be able to acknowledge the original point of sale of your customer’s purchase. Being able to see a customer’s entire order history will enable associates and digital systems to help the customer find a replacement item, an entirely new item, or give them an easy path to a refund of their original purchase payment. Even if a return does not result in an additional sale, a seamless returns process is one of the key factors in gaining customer loyalty.
Next Steps
Analytics are absolutely critical for retailers post-holiday peak. This period is about keeping the customer promise by connecting systems together for a seamless shopping experience, as well as recovering and understanding what happened during the holiday season and how to move forward now that it is winding down. Retailers that succeed use quality analytics and business intelligence to understand where their business did well and where they could have improved during peak season, and use that information as a basis for the next year’s planning. Ultimately, planning for holiday season 2021 begins with the recap of holiday season 2020.
Gene Bornac is Chief Strategy Officer at enVista. He is a well-respected thought leader with more than 32 years of experience in the retail and consumer products industries. His leadership experience includes specialty retail management at the store and district levels, plus executive-level experience at multiple consulting firms and retail technology companies. Bornac’s expertise in store operations and buying, planning and forecasting has helped him as an industry consultant and software strategist solving business and IT problems for many top retailers.
