Click & Collect in an omnichannel strategy: our successful project for a fashion giant

The fashion industry – and, by reflex, the Retail sector – has been showing interest in omnichannel user experiences for quite some time. If, on the one hand, many retailers have already taken concrete steps in that direction, technical execution might still be an issue and hold brands back from delivering a truly compelling experience.

However, the benefits granted by a perfectly executed omnichannel strategy are numerous and objective: it allows the creation of a seamless experience across all channels and media, encompassing the brand’s online and offline touchpoints basically unraveling from – for example – a point-of-sale system to a social media advertisement with a digitally shoppable item. At the same time, it produces full-funnel engagement as it dramatically improves customer experience and provides several different channels for customer purchases, both physical and digital. Therefore, brand awareness and sales get boosted because such an approach increases online retail revenue while driving significant traffic to the stores.

Of course, creating such an itinerary is a complex matter that needs sophisticated preliminary analyses and top-notch technologies to deliver multi touch campaigns that can encompass in-store actions and virtual experiences.

Because of this, understanding and identifying the four key pillars of an effective omnichannel strategy must come first: sales, as your sales strategy influences your omnichannel approach and allows you to determine the main channels your audience will touch; marketing, because your message will have to look coherent and consistent across all channels, making your customers feel connected to your brand; logistics, as order fulfillment is essential to deliver the product you promised; operations, because every omnichannel strategy will need a system that ties all the channels together.

The Click & Collect service is an essential tool in advanced omnichannel marketing strategies as it allows shoppers to order their items online and pick them up in the store. It de facto creates a hybrid model made of digital and physical experiences and provides an optimized and perfectly streamlined customer experience (and transaction!).

What is Click & Collect and why is it pivotal for a successful omnichannel approach?

The Click & Collect service allows companies to overcome one of the main bottlenecks of past omnichannel strategies – the discrepancy between the vision and the technology able to deliver it – as it is a testimony to the powerful evolutions of the modern retail sector. New technologies are designed to meet increasingly more articulated customer expectations and provide a more straightforward, more customized and overall more satisfying purchase experience.

The benefits of a well-executed Click & Collect service are, once again, numerous:

• It allows retailers and brands to create a fully integrated omnichannel experience for their customers, enhancing its results.
• It increases in-store traffic by converting – or concluding – a digital experience with physical actions.
• It reduces shipping and transportation costs, i.e., by eliminating the dreaded “last mile delivery”, which is notoriously unpredictable, quite expensive and no longer sustainable [link to previous article for Syscons].
• It lowers return rates because the final part of the experience, which happens in-store, allows retailers to make sure the customer is happy with their purchase.
• It allows retailers to collect data on customer preferences and tailor services and products to their specific requirements and expectations.
• It promotes accessory marketing actions like cross-selling and upselling.
• It increases customer satisfaction as it responds to current customers’ needs: quick in-and-out experiences; no waiting in lines; easy management of their time; convenient locations to retrieve their purchases; emotional comfort of a “tactile” purchasing (customers can inspect the item while in-store); saving in shipping costs (convenience).

Syscons Interactive’ successful Click & Collect project for a global luxury fashion brand

All the benefits mentioned above are perfectly transposed into the prestigious project Syscons Interactive led for a worldwide renowned Luxury Fashion brand, which recently introduced the Click & Collect service into purchase experiences to integrate its online channels with physical stores.

More specifically, this leading Fashion House aimed at improving its upselling and cross-selling processes while focusing on the pivotal aspect of the so-called “ceremony”. Such a term has to be interpreted as the ability to provide a tailored, memorable and distinctive level of service to each customer, a philosophy that is perfectly in line with the brand’s vision of sophistication and exclusivity.

Syscons Interactive flawlessly designed several processes to reach such goals: from the Click & Collect service to the reporting phase, to the study and development of a customized Retail application.

We have supported our client step-by-step in ensuring that each purchase experience could be excellent in every aspect through flawless streamlining:

• The customer purchases an item on the Fashion house’s e-commerce website and chooses to pick it up in a specific physical store.
• Once the item arrives at the store, the Quality Officer makes sure of its excellent condition.
• The Quality Officer signals the system through the dedicated retail app that the item is ready to be delivered to the customer.
• The store automatically sends an e-mail to the customer, informing them that their purchase is ready to be collected in the store of their choice.
• The customer has fourteen days to collect their product.
• If necessary, the retail flow will remind the customer that their package is ready to be retrieved at the store.

The dedicated app Syscons Interactive designed for the Fashion House also allows the visualization of the order history and the booking of an appointment in-store. Furthermore, the return process automatically begins in the case of a “customer no-show“, which implies that the customer has not collected their item.

The Fashion House requested – and obtained – a further implementation which consists of the manual sending of an e-mail from the Store Manager to the Call Center to kick-start the in-store return for a specific item. Once the Client Advisor receives the report, the return process for the customer is opened on the SAP-integrated Manhattan Omnichannel Retail Software.

Essentially, the Click & Collect service designed by Syscons Interactive for this leading Fashion House involves different roles depending on the system:

• Front Office: Sales Assistant.
• Back Office House: dedicated to the warehouse and logistics.
• Store Manager: whose role is to contact the customer and inform them that they can pick up their product or, vice-versa, to kick-start the return process by contacting the brand’s call center.
• Client Advisor: they work for the Fashion House’s call center and take care of orders via phone or returns. As a member of the Click & Collect project, they can open return processes for the store.

It is also important to stress out that our Click & Collect project adapts to different countries, carefully taking into consideration not only differences in technologies but also in purchase culture: from geographical areas where returns are more frequent to those where ordering the same item in two different sizes (hence returning only one of them) is common practice; to deferred payment methods which are more typical of certain nations.

The platforms involved in the Click & Collect project are several: from the already mentioned Manhattan OMS to SAP for the Logistic System; from CyberSource for payments to Riskified, to reduce the risk of frauds significantly; to further software for managing payments and, if necessary, fraud-related issues.

Our famous client is delighted with the outcome of our project, not only because of the seamless experience that our Click & Collect service ensures but also because Syscons Interactive provides systematic post-live assistance, hence guaranteeing flawless customer satisfaction – as shown by the lack of operational gaps throughout the process.

Syscons Interactive is part of the leading brand Syscons Group and specializes in Omnichannel & Digital Supply Chain Solutions.

Get in touch with our skilled consultants: let’s talk about your next big project.