The shopping experience has drastically changed over the past fifteen years or so. Where shopping once began and ended in a brick-and-mortar store, shopping now is a journey across many channels - online and offline. The number of touchpoints that customers use to buy a product has increased from two touchpoints fifteen years ago to six on average nowadays.
Omnichannel is Essential
Over the past years, many new sales channels have gained popularity (marketplaces, social shopping, apps). Consequently, selling products in multiple channels has become a standard for many businesses. Many have ended up implementing omnichannel strategies. The term omnichannel refers to unifying sales channels to provide a consistent experience across the brand to meet customer expectations.
Nowadays, merchants that have an omnichannel strategy in place, experience growth through gaining a new customer base, customer retention, and higher revenues.
Businesses are experiencing many challenges in adapting to the changes in the (e)commerce landscape. Often, the most significant hurdles are the technologies that are being used to offer a true omnichannel experience.
Replacing Legacy Systems
Traditionally many businesses have put into place solutions to manage their digital operations in the best way possible, including Enterprise Resource Planning software (ERP), Order Management software (OMS), Customer Relationship Management solutions (CRM), Warehouse Management Software (WMS), and much more.
To keep up with the change in operational demands, integrations have been created between existing systems. This has lead to integration mazes, in which solutions cannot fully communicate, creating cumbersome data silos. Working in solution mazes is highly inefficient. Employees have to manually switch and transfer data between multiple solutions with a high chance of error. Also, making sure all these different pieces of software are kept up to date, takes up a lot of valuable time and money.
To solve these problems business leaders are looking for alternatives. In the process, they are being sold enterprise software that claim to have the ability to unify operations. However, especially ERP vendors are notorious for selling products that do not live up to these expectations. Many ERP systems are as inflexible and hard to maintain as the legacy systems already in place.
Towards a Unified Solution
Time for a change! Global analytics firm Forrester’s latest report describes a transition away from legacy systems, to a unified, modern, flexible, and sustainable Digital Operations Platform (DOP).
So what is DOP? This is what we will present to you during our conference
