Creating an 'Experience Platform' That Delivers on the Retail Brand Promise

With each passing month, the impact of the internet, mobile and social media on retail strengthens. And yet in this incrementally changing marketplace — like the proverbial frog in slowly heating water — many retailers are still unclear on when to make the leap to a truly seamless cross-channel platform.

Many brick and mortar retailers today will point to the fact that fewer than 6 percent of total U.S. retail sales are directly transacted on the internet. However, the share of pure-play e-commerce sales is growing rapidly — up 13 percent in the third quarter of 2011 alone and projected to surpass offline sales in dollar value by 2020. This rapid progress may be a function of e-retailers' dedication to technology. Forrester reports that internet retailers spend more than three times as much (as a percentage of revenue) on technology than their brick and mortar counterparts.

Empowered today by anytime/anywhere access to information and a ballooning population of e-commerce brands, consumers are leveraging every digital touch point in their search for knowledge, deals and personalized experiences. For retailers to evolve with this marketplace and continue to deliver on their brand promises, the time has come to move beyond the limits of individual channels and touch points and instead create well-choreographed cross-channel interactions.

However, the overwhelming issue for most traditional retailers is that they do not have the infrastructure in place to engineer these advancements. A clash of legacy systems and new channel technologies has resulted in siloed functional areas and redundant operations across channels. These have all but doomed attempts to share and use critical inventory and customer data across touch points.

Your Experience Platform
What sets the best cross-channel retailers apart is their ability to align business processes that enable their own truly differentiated customer experience no matter how or where the customer encounters their brand. Oracle calls this vision "Your Experience Platform" and, in its new whitepaper on the topic, lays out three tenets that must be applied in tandem across the retail organization to help retailers deliver on their brand promise and drive profitable growth:

1. Connect Interactions
2. Gain Actionable Insight
3. Optimize Operations

Learn about the three tenets of an Experience Platform...

Download Oracle Retail's whitepaper to learnabout creating a Your Experience Platform tuned to your specific retail business strategy.

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