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Done right, multichannel retailing is a study in coordination. It's the old cliché about the right hand knowing what the left hand is doing. But for retailers, it's much more complicated than that. After all, the only things that differentiate your right hand from your left are opposable thumbs. Consider the minute differences between online, store, and catalog retail venues. There is no challenge quite like achieving continuity across them.

Achieving this consistency means making all customer information accessible to everyone in the enterprise, and the customers themselves. It means sharing real inventory - not just inventory data - among channels. And often, it means scrapping your homegrown systems for something new and scalable.

Share Customer Histories Across Channels
"In the past, customer purchasing information was handled with a silo mentality," says John Marrah, CEO of Ecometry (Delray Beach, FL). "A retailer with a customer in his store had no idea what that customer had previously bought, be it in the store, on the Web, or from a catalog. But all that information has to be made available to the entire company in order to accurately forecast and effectively sell and service the customer," he says. But to truly achieve that level of customer service, the information has to be made available to the customer as well. "A customer needs access to specific information about previous purchases," says Marrah. He illustrates the point with the following example. A woman buys a blue sweater at your Web site. While browsing your physical store a week later, she sees a skirt that she thinks would look nice with the sweater. But exactly what color blue was that sweater? Will they match? "Whoever is helping that customer, regardless of channel, ought to be equipped with the information to match it up for her," Marrah contends. Presently, there is great disparity between customer service levels at otherwise comparable retailers. The day is upon us that retailers who don't use technology to improve customer service will feel the burden of customers who abandon them for better service.

Create A Central Inventory Repository
Tamara Artim, VP of services and marketing at Intershop (San Francisco), says centralization is key in an industry focused on carrying the look, product availability, and pricing through all sales channels. "The integration of several silos into one e-commerce platform is imperative," she says. "In the past, telesales, customer service, and Web sales were all using different platforms to take and deliver orders. They ended up with different buckets of customer data for each group." Artim says her company is seeing a trend with retailers who want it all to be integrated and driven off an e-commerce engine.

Maintaining inventory in separate silos is very expensive and inefficient. You're a retailer, and retail is all about selling. If you have inventory anywhere in your enterprise, you should be equipped to sell it through any channel you possibly can. "Making inventory accessible to all channels gives you a faster turn, and if a customer is there and sees it, you want to fulfill that customer's request," says Marrah. "You want that customer to think you're a great company and get them to come back and buy from you again. Knocking down the walls that segment selling channels will provide much better customer service," he says.

With a centralized inventory repository in place, Artim says retailers, especially those selling commodities like consumer electronics on the Web, can provide levels of customer service that trounce the competition. "If a consumer is willing to buy a $5,000 home theater system or computer online, the Web interface has to be sophisticated. You need to offer product configuration tools. You need to allow your consumer to configure their purchase to order," she says. "The consumer needs to be able to navigate the Web without having to pick up the phone and call the customer support line." This means retailers have to strive for "zero latency" in their connected inventory systems. "The consumer needs to know next to immediately about product availability. We want them to know if a piece of their order is on backorder," she says.

Bolt It Together Or Build It From Scratch?
Artim and Marrah agree that if you don't have one enterprise system running retail, catalog, and e-commerce, you at least need to have systems that integrate with each other and share inventory, customer, purchase, and financial information across channels. "If you don't have open systems, that can be very challenging," says Marrah. Artim says Intershop is busy with retail customers who are realizing that systems they bolted together years ago won't scale. "They can't interface. We're seeing lots of replacement and upgrades," she says. Ecometry's customers are retailers that previously had custom homegrown systems. "We're working for companies with homegrown systems that are realizing the financial impact of trying to build and maintain their own makes it prohibitive," says Marrah.

Rebuilding third-party B2B integration with suppliers is also a busy area for Intershop and Ecometry. "We're enabling the connectivity with technologies like JAVA and XML (extensible markup language), which are easily integrated with credit processing, FedEx, UPS, and fraud protection programs," she says. Marrah says the focus at Ecometry is to provide more retail B2B and distribution functionality, opening systems up with Web services, XML, and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) technologies to provide complete integration between retail systems and third party systems.

If you've got product that's not selling because of a wall between your separate inventories, you've certainly increased your inventory carrying costs and probably denied service to a customer. Perhaps it's time to connect or rebuild.