Retailers’ Top Digital Priority Is To Create A Consistent Brand Experience Across Channels

A new study from Boston Retail Partners (BRP) found that 56 percent of retailers said their top digital priority is to create a consistent brand experience for consumers across all of their channels.

“Today’s unified commerce imperative moves the heart of the transaction to a centralized platform,” Jeffrey Neville, vice president at BRP, said in a statement. “This allows retailers to become more innovative and agile with their digital commerce offerings to further enable a personalized customer experience. It is promising to see that retailers are laser-focused on delivering the seamless, cross-channel experience consumers expect.”

In order to effectively engage customers, retailers want to offer personalized, compelling and consistent brand messaging across all their channels. According to the study, retailers plan to do this in a number of ways: 58 percent said they plan to implement geolocation within the next two years, 50 percent plan to roll out customer-identifying technology in-store within the next two years and 40 percent of retailers said improving personalization was their top digital priority.

In addition, 75 percent of retailers said they plan to host a single shared cart across all their channels within three years, while 50 percent said they planned to offer “start anywhere, finish anywhere” shopping options within five years.

Forty-six percent of retailers said that improving their mobile shopping experience was their top digital priority.

Order management systems are also a top priority for online retailers, as 73 percent said they planned to implement them as the center of their unified commerce platform within the next three years and 38 percent said they planned to add more employees and new initiatives as a way to implement these new omnichannel tasks.