Mapping the Genome of Flow Commerce: The Omnichannel Charade Must End
Before we jump into the details of Flow Commerce and why it is not just a rebranding of Omnichannel, let’s review how we got to this point. In the beginning, there was a store. A single channel experience that required customers to visit and shop at a cadence that was directly influenced by inventory and availability. With the advent of the internet, we could duplicate the experience online and through the web and eventually mobile devices, which created a separate and distinct multi-channel shopping opportunity for the consumer. As users tired of the disjointed view of inventory and experience across those channels, companies established the façade of an Omnichannel experience as an attempt to create the best experience regardless of the channel selected by consumers. The Achilles heel of Omnichannel has proven to be the silos built on organizational structure, business systems, and related data that are, in reality, too hard or too expensive to integrate in a way that delivers the desired experience of the current and future consumer.
Over that past few years, everyone in digital commerce space has been chasing the omnichannel dream. Some have come close; many have spent significant time and resources without realizing the expected or anticipated value. In the end, the façade of one channel created on top of existing disparate systems and siloed data repositories provides only a contextual experience for customers. In spite of the best intentions, the continued internal focus on individual or multiple channels is reflected in the customer experience. The consumer does not share that context, so one could say that the idea of omnichannel was out of alignment with their expectations form the beginning and, therefore, erroneous from the start. For commerce to continue to grow and succeed, experiences need to be driven from the customer’s perspective to provide an endless flowing commerce experience without awareness or regard for the channel.
The next frontier for commerce is an authentic and real Flow Commerce experience for consumers. We need to accept the reality that shopping is woven throughout our days, rather than a destination activity. Every consumer defines their desired activities that cannot be limited to a single channel, or even existing well-defined channels that might intersect based on organizational lines or systems integrations. The answer, while challenging to accept, is that businesses will need to adjust and establish foundationally different systems and platforms that will make the disconnected channel activity a reality. This new platform will push against existing organizational boundaries and force internal company retrospectives that will be quite disruptive.
Flow Commerce moves the experience beyond Omnichannel with its ability to decouple the consumer’s actions along the shopping journey. Where browsing the endless aisle of inventory is not linked or limited to a channel, the browsing channel does not drive fulfillment options, the payment options are not limited or driven by browsing or fulfillment decisions, and how the product is used or consumed is not defined by any specific choice in the shopping journey.
Leaders will align with the customer by embracing Flow Commerce and change the core of who they are, how they organize, and how they deliver technical capabilities to support the entire ecosystem, both internal and external. Digital commerce and the omnichannel experience drove the creation of the Chief Digital Officer role and the ensuing decoupling of enterprise, store, and digital systems. As brands move to create the Flow Commerce experience, we will see the convergence of operations and the related CIO, CDO, CTO roles. While 50 years old, Conway’s Law still holds: “ organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” Last month Yum Brands made a subtle yet revealing announcement with the selection of Clay Johnson as the Chief Digital and Technology Officer. A disruption to the norm that establishes the foundation for them to deliver on Flow Commerce ahead of their peers.
Technical capabilities will need to adjust to support a Flow Commerce experience for consumers. There will need to be a similar shift in thinking of business domain alignment, Systems of Record (SOR), and Systems of Experience. We are already seeing legacy and emerging Point of Sale systems being reimagined as Point of Service systems to support this emerging experience. Brands are buying and implementing these new POS systems as the headless foundation for all channels of commerce to be built on and interact with to create the possibility of Flow Commerce for their consumers.
Why is this so important? Research from Gartner shows that by the end of 2019, 81% of your competitors say they will be competing mostly or entirely based on Customer Experience. To stay in the race, organizations will need to define a Flow Commerce strategy with one platform that supports every defined channel uniformly for inventory visibility, fulfillment choices, and payment options.
