Radial, an e-commerce technology provider recently collaborated with Quadrant Knowledge Solutions, to explore the subject “Is Your Order Management System Letting Your Customers Down?” The idea of the webinar revolved around the need for Order Management Systems (OMS) to be upgraded to Omnichannel OMS, with built-in capabilities of “Buy-Anywhere, Fulfil-Anywhere, and Return-Anywhere” solutions to keep pace with the recent times.
The first speaker, Ms. Shruti Jadhav, Associate Research Director, Quadrant Knowledge Solutions, explained how processes like the scalability of order orchestration, delivery time, and intelligent routing can be optimized by leveraging advanced automation and AI/ML technologies. With the SPARK Matrix analysis, she then brought to light how the Omnichannel OMS market is expected to grow from $ 814.5M in 2020 to $ 1.45B in 2025, with a CAGR of 12.5%.
Mr. Prashant Bhatia (Senior VP, Enterprise Commerce Solutions, Radial Inc), then took the presentation forward by throwing light at how Radial’s OMS provides an extensible platform to exceed customer expectations and support profitable growth. He also demonstrated how ‘Radial’ as a company provides solutions to help its customers provide their customers a better customer experience.
To see the web event, click “Is Your Order Management System Letting Your Customers Down?”
Our Observations and Learning
An order management system (OMS) is an electronic system developed for functionalities including inventory management, orders execution, and package tracking.
Traditional OMS was a manual input system of logging in entries of received orders and fulfilled orders, packed and shipped packages, which inherently had accuracy issues. Also, the number of channels through which organizations reached customers was limited to in-store and online.
But today, there’s a variety of touchpoints ranging from social media to company events to advertising and a lot more. With these, handling customer experience across all these touchpoints has become an extensive area to be dealt with.
Organizations have thus begun focusing on upgrading their OMSs to Omnichannel OMSs with the inculcation of trending innovative technologies like AI/ML and comprehensive functionalities like intelligent routing and intelligent order fulfilment.
So, let’s dive into a few capabilities of modern Omnichannel OMSs offer to make your work efficient, and customers happy:
Order Management
This capability helps automate various manual processes through integration of Business Intelligence (BI), Real-time Performance Analysis, Enhanced Customer Service, and Intelligent Order Orchestration.
Store Fulfilment
Customers feel more comfortable and are likely to buy more when they can physically see options instead of watching them on a screen. Thus, OMSs now facilitate features including ship from store, buy online pick up/return in-store, ship to store, store associate delivery etc.
Dropship capabilities
Instead of stocking in-house inventory and dealing with surrounding risks, dropship capabilities allow products to be directly be shipped from third party to the customer. This increases speed of delivery, reduces shipping costs, and facilitates the availability of a wide range of products across channels.
Marketplace
Real-time order status, following order placement is provided once the OMS is integrated with a marketplace. An integration with marketplaces can help organizations have a wide range of audience to begin with and encourages customer trust and loyalty.
Buy-Anywhere, Fulfil-Anywhere, and Return-Anywhere
Easy to use and customize customer support, order fulfilment and order return interfaces along with seamless integration between multiple customer engagement channels promotes a consistent user experience and a positive brand image amongst consumers.
There are also some emerging trends that OMSs vendors are latching on to. While evaluating a solution, you may want to look out for –
Integration with Artificial Intelligence /Machine Learning
With the integration of AI/ML-driven multi-armed bandit and random forest algorithms, capabilities of an OMS can be enhanced. This can foster a growth in strategic partnerships. A predictable platform embedded with real-time intelligence in the algorithms can deliver useful insights to organizations.
Contactless Commerce
The Covid-19 pandemic has forced the world to shift to contactless interfaces. Thus, an OMS should allow contactless fulfilment models including contactless payment and self-service options.
Micro-Service Architecture
This style of architecture allows OMS application as a collection of various services that are loosely coupled and independently deployed. This enhances cross-departmental productivity as collaborative work across departments can be done at once.
Headless Commerce Approach
In the headless commerce approach, the same platform is used for all commerce touchpoints, with slight variations in UI. UI developers can make changes to the frontend without disturbing the backend, without shutting down the site for maintenance. It also helps customers have a personalized experience both online and offline, which enhances CX.
With all these features of an OMS, organizations can seamlessly gain powerful insights with the use of BI, have real-time inventory visibility, and fulfil omnichannel demands – thus enhancing customer experience. Analysts from QKS believe that organizations pursuing the idea of an OMS with the aforementioned comprehensive capabilities will most certainly lead the successful implementation of CXM race.
