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Multichannel retailing has become the new norm in retail with multichannel retailers rapidly adopting new and interesting touchpoints to engage and interact with customers. A shopper who browses a product in a catalog can visit a brick and mortar store to have a better look at it, and then decide to order for it online or arrange for its delivery to his home or office. In effect, multichannel customers engage with retailers on more than one channel, leveraging the benefits of each, to best advantage. Research points out that cross channel customers have higher monetary spend and lifetime value, as compared to single channel shoppers. This makes them an attractive segment for retailers to target and leading retailers are establishing their presence across new channels, including social networking sites and mobile applications – to interact with customers in new and innovative ways. Successful multichannel retailers have to focus on integrated operations across channels offering customer centric merchandising and seamless ][ shopping experiences across all touch points. Else, they stand the risk of operating several channels that work at cross purposes with each other, targeting the same customer base and often leading to less than satisfactory customer interactions. As a critical step towards achieving this, retailers have to build capabilities in Multichannel Analytics. Advanced multichannel analytics for retailers can capture and analyse near-real time data from multiple streams and facilitate integrated cross channel decision making. It enables efficient multi channel order management, synchronized assortment planning, unified pricing and cross channel promotions – sending out a consistent message to customers about the retailer across all channels. Advanced customer analytics can bring together customer interaction data from across different channels to provide a unified vision of the customer. Key identifiers such as customer name or IDs, promotion codes, order numbers, payment identifiers (e.g., credit card) and cookies put in place by these multichannel retailing systems help retailers recognize their customers, follow their shopping process across channels and understand how they interact and buy. Advanced multichannel analytics models are critical in enabling retailers to achieve long term sustainability of their multi channel operations and offer extremely fulfilling shopper experiences.

About the Author:
Retail Analytics is playing a key role in designing successful Multichannel Retailing strategies. Today Multichannel Analytics for Retailers focus on providing Advanced Customer Analytics insights and help towards customer centric merchandising across channels.