Digital transformation isn’t just a requirement in today’s ecommerce—it’s a race. The businesses that transform the fastest are the winners, increasing profit and loyalty while ensuring long-term success.
Consumer demand for personalized omnichannel experiences has led companies and ecommerce organizations to rethink operations, so customer experience optimization is a number-one priority. With the growth of online channels, there is a pressing need to collect and analyze data to gather valuable insights about customers, preferences, and desires. That’s where unified commerce comes in.
Unified commerce is the next evolutionary step of an omnichannel strategy. Unified commerce combines an organization’s channels, systems, products, and customer orders and consolidates them into one platform. With unified commerce, all backend systems relate to all customer-facing touchpoints. As a result, you gain a 360-degree view of customer interactions and orders and complete visibility into products and inventory across all channels, ultimately allowing you to deliver better shopping experiences.
What is an Order Management System?
Order management is at the heart of a great customer experience, and the functionality it brings works as the heartbeat of your successful digital business. Order management unifies commerce transactions like handling the entire cycle from buying to cart to fulfillment to carrying out your brand promise and building customer loyalty. Order management keeps your business seamlessly running to remain competitive. Getting an order wrong on a first-time customer has a significant impact on your bottom line because that customer will never get to the state of experiencing how great your products and services are.
An Order Management System (OMS) on the backend of your ecommerce business drives your customer’s overall shopping experience and profitability. Customers demand a frictionless post-purchase process from checkout to delivery. They want to receive products on time and their terms, including same-day shipping or picking up an item from a brick-and-mortar location. Your customers want visibility and real-time updates along the way.
5 Critical Ways an OMS Can Help You Meet Customer Expectations
1) Simplifying order servicing. It’s important to integrate your commerce, service, and sales efforts, bridging the gap between disparate systems. OMS can connect and unify data to give agents complete visibility to serve your customers better, including:
- Order status
- Nearby stores, pickup locations, or distribution hubs
- Order modifications
- Merchandise returns
2) Offering flexible shipping and delivery. Providing flexible options is key to earning customer loyalty and trust. Seventy percent of companies have lost business due to order-specific errors.
3) Enabling self-service options. When all your channels offer self-service using chatbots or artificial intelligence, your service processes are automated, resulting in agent productivity that empowers your customers to:
- Check on orders
- Modify or cancel orders
- Receive updates on preferred channels
4) Managing the entire order lifecycle. You’ll need an agile OMS to ensure customer satisfaction throughout the post-purchase journey. OMS can track and manage orders from fulfillment to payment so that your company can:
- Customize business processes to ensure efficiency
- Unlock a unified view of the fulfillment process
- Gain data and insights to drive future purchases
5) Streamlining inventory. You can fulfill from anywhere with a connected backend across all networks and distribution locals. A streamlined inventory enables you to improve your post-purchase experience by offering fast and easy ordering. You can increase profitability and bypass inventory bottlenecks by optimizing factors like delivery speed or cost to fulfill.
Top 7 Must-Have Functions of Order Management Systems
1) Buy Online Pickup In Store
2) Curbside Pickup
3) Buy Online Return In Store
4) Fulfillment from Anywhere
5) In-Store Product Availability
6) In-Store Endless Aisle
7) 360-Degree Customer View
How OMS Functionality Can Work for Your Business
As the hub of business activity, today’s OMS must adjust to constantly changing market conditions and consumer demands. Our modern world demands unified commerce to be agile, scalable, and extensible. Like the human body, the OMS is at the heart of a great customer experience serving as the circulatory system that coordinates all the order management functions behind the scenes.
With the pandemic’s acceleration of demand for omnichannel services such as Buy Online Pickup in Store (BOPIS) and Curbside Pickup, new layers of complexity have been demanded. OMS seamlessly synchronizes backend operations, covering processing and managing orders and customer data, inventory levels, product information, fulfillment data, and more.
An OMS can track and store customer data, process orders, allocate order distribution and ensure all other systems in the supply chain are updated and shared across all channels. An OMS also efficiently orchestrates orders across channels, store locations, and suppliers and enables critical capabilities like Buy Online Pickup In-Store while improving backend operations and reducing costs.
A full-featured ecommerce order management system can allow your business to automate and streamline your order flow from the point of purchase to the customer. Your retail order management software can also process orders from multiple channels like ecommerce, mobile, call center, and social channels. Additionally, your OMS can allocate orders to multiple sources of fulfillment such as warehouses, vendor drop-ship partners, and brick-and-mortar stores and track the order to the customer.
Across the world and throughout industries, business leaders are building digital supply chains that provide end-to-end visibility, resiliency, and sustainability because inventory and fulfillment of orders are critical. Today’s OMS includes advanced, cross-channel order processing functionality to provide insights into critical data to help you make better business decisions on merchandising, returns, inventory, and marketing.
What Functionalities Does Your Business Need?
Determine how your business ranks and if an OMS could improve your ecommerce revenue performance. Get our free white paper and workbook, “Your Ultimate Salesforce Order Management Systems Guide to Success,” now!
