Cross-Channel to Impact Stores

I attended the RIS News Cross-Channel Executive Summit last week, and I have crossed a milestone. As I told attendees in my speech at the event, I come from a stores background, which gives me a different take on cross-channel than most others in the industry, because those people primarily come out of eCommerce. There simply aren't a lot of individuals out there who understand stores well and also see the looming opportunity of cross-channel and its impact on stores. So usually when I attend these events, I know many attendees there, I like them all - have great respect for many. But they're all eCommerce people. As one colleague of mine once said, "They're not really my peops."

This is no longer the case. Not only are people that you might once have billed as eCommerce-only thinking about (and gaining responsibility for) a lot more than eCommerce's role in serving an omni-channel shopper, they are rapidly becoming the primary owners of their brand's customer experience. And I heard the term "omni-channel" (props to RSR's own Paula Rosenblum for coining the phrase) more times than I can count.

Here are some great examples of what I saw:

• A retailer who, at the same time they designed a mobile customer experience, leveraged that design and development effort to build an employee-facing mobile experience as well. Brilliant - now employees and customers can at least be on the same page, and with the same architecture to support both, there are future opportunities to improve both sides of the experience with a single rollout.

• Several retailers who are rethinking their whole store architecture. I cannot say it plainly enough: unless you are a grocer (in which case, rather than "does not apply" we're just talking about a longer timeline than for everyone else), point of sale is rapidly becoming irrelevant. How well can your eCommerce platform cross channels? Can it be the employee experience in stores? From the rumblings in the room, there are several retailers who are in process of finding out.

• iPads are coming to stores. One retailer talked about testing them as employee-facing devices this holiday season, and several others were interested. The challenge is that while in-store technology is "retail-hardened," things are moving so fast and customer (and by extension employee) expectations about how to use technology also change quickly - multi-touch anyone?

• Price transparency is a huge concern. If I had to name one theme of the worries or questions from the event, it would be price transparency. No one has cracked the nut yet - and by price transparency I don't even mean shopping aggregators and price comparison sites and the like, I'm talking about within the retailer's own "walls" - but they are looking to mobile as the answer. If you've got retailer apps on your phone, check them in November to see if you can receive personal offers there for the holidays. According to several retailers' plans, you might just be able to do that - and redeem them in the store.

The one thing we all agreed on is that things are moving at blazing-fast speeds. I made the observation that 5 years ago hardly anyone would have targeted to replace their point of sale with an eCommerce platform. A retailer observed in response that 6 months ago he would not have thought it important to be able to sell on his brand's Facebook page. Touche.

About the author:Nikki Baird is a Managing Partner at RSR Research , a technology analyst firm specializing in consumer and retailer technology adoption trends.