5 ways to differentiate your brand experience: The power of channel-less commerce

Brands must now go above and beyond in offering great products and managing multiple touchpoints to capture new consumers and build lasting loyalty in the competitive marketplace.

Traditionally, consumer interactions have been structured around distinct channels, such as physical stores, online websites, mobile apps, mailings, emails and social media platforms. Each channel operated relatively independently, with its strategies, inventories and consumer engagement tactics.

New technologies have changed consumer behaviour. Consumers now expect a consistent, seamless and interconnected experience regardless of the channel they interact through.

DELIVERING SEAMLESS EXPERIENCE AND CONNECTED COMMERCE

To achieve channel-less commerce, brands must focus on the entire consumer journey, managing the blurring and interplay across physical and digital channels by building the correct data, technology, organisational capabilities and ways of working.

To illustrate what’s required, we pose five questions that brands must address to move to a channel-less experience.

1. Are you clear on what your consumers need and expect?

Defining channel-less commerce for your brand requires directly responding to your consumers’ needs, expectations and behaviours. Touchpoints should interweave seamlessly from one to the other to reflect how your consumers shift between channels, from search and attract to post-purchase. Doing this requires an ever-evolving understanding of your consumers’ needs throughout their journey.

• Start with your consumer: Understanding what consumers want from their interactions with your brand is crucial across all touchpoints and at every stage in their journey. Gather insights and build empathy with your consumers, using data and specific feedback to define their needs, movements across channels, and pain points at different journey stages. Use this insight to create service blueprints, setting the basis for your future experience design.
• Map specific journeys: Shift from brand-focused to consumer-focused journeys. Use consumer needs and behaviours to map the process flow and design interactions that encourage brand interaction on their terms, driving them through existing behaviours to branded digital platforms that exceed their needs and expectations.
• Design meaningful and personalised experiences: Building on your foundational understanding of your consumers will ensure that every interaction, no matter the channel, is consistent and adds value. Use design thinking to craft the moments that matter, respond to your consumers’ essential requirements, and delight them by meeting their needs in new and unexpected ways.

Consumer needs are constantly evolving, and market leaders set expectations, so it’s critical that brands be agile in their approach to understanding and reacting to ever-updating requirements. Brands should ensure they build a consumer-first approach to designing interactions across all touchpoints.

2. Can you consistently interact with your consumer in the right way, at the right time, with the right message?

Channel-less means using data, insights and technology to effectively deliver the right message at the right time and through the proper channels to resonate and drive brand interactions.

To do this effectively, brands must:

• Leverage insights for segmentation: Create specific consumer segments based on interaction data, consumer insights and wider trend data to develop and deliver personalised messages to specific consumer groups. Use market analysis to understand how your consumers speak about their behaviours and your brand to create messages that resonate for these segments.
• Develop an integrated marketing and service approach: Establish success metrics, including key outcomes for marketing and service across all channels and touchpoints that deliver an integrated approach. This requires strong cross-functional collaboration and an understanding of each role’s impact on delivering outcomes.
• Harness data and technology: Embed the use of data into your content creation approach to develop relevant and personalised messages to your consumers. Leverage this data and develop an agile run-test-iterate cycle to gain insight into resonating messages. Use generative AI to turbocharge this process, creating a more cost-effective content creation and delivery approach.

This approach requires embracing data, insights and technology to understand consumer trends, streamline content creation processes, and simultaneously deliver personalised and relevant messages.

3. Do your systems and data flows support a channel-less experience?

Seamless commerce requires the removal of channel silos. Data must be integrated and accessible to all, providing a 360-degree view of your consumers, transactions, stock, etc. Brands also need the right technology and digital capabilities to deliver experiences in an agile, cost-effective and scalable way.

• Align your data strategy and governance: Create a channel- and function-agnostic framework that combines data from the entire business (financial, regulatory, consumer, stock) and all channels (store, social, e-commerce sites, consumer service interactions, etc). This will provide a single view of your consumer and their activity. Establishing strong data governance policies will ensure data accuracy, consistency and security.
• Integrate your tech stack with real-time data processing: Deploy an integrated technology stack that includes e-commerce platforms, CRM systems, marketing automation tools and consumer data platforms. Ensure these systems can communicate with each other effectively. If possible, implement systems that support real-time data collection and analysis, allowing brands to deliver responsive service and dynamic marketing activity.
• Utilise advanced analytics and AI to derive actionable insights from consumer data. This can help personalise consumer interactions (messaging, promotions, pricing and more) and predict future behaviours. However, there is a watch-out – brands must ensure personalisation provides a tailored and relevant experience without being too individual and invading personal privacy.

Develop and implement a comprehensive data strategy that ensures data quality, integration and actionable insights. Invest in technologies that integrate and support advanced analytics and real-time processing, providing a cohesive infrastructure for channel-less commerce.

4. Can you work cross-functionally and across entire ecosystems effectively?

Transforming how consumers interact with brands will require transformation. Teams and stakeholders need to see and work towards the same consumer strategy.

We recommend focusing on:

• Organisational objectives: Define a set of organisational goals linked to the consumer experience outcomes you aim to achieve. These should be set for the overall organisation and then cascaded to all relevant teams—internal and external (e.g., your retailers and supply chain partners). Teams working towards shared objectives and outcomes will also allow the organisation to flex and adapt to ongoing changes in the market and consumer demands.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Ensure all teams and partners understand their roles in delivering the full end-to-end consumer experience, not only their part. This requires fostering a culture of cooperation, collaboration and open communication, breaking down silos between teams, functions and stakeholders. A practical way of achieving this is to work through specific scenarios and define the particular behaviours as part of a role/team responsibility.
• Outline clear roles and responsibilities: Define and communicate clear roles and responsibilities, particularly for cross-function and cross-channel coordination and consumer journey management. Ensure you define decision accountabilities clearly, both where ultimate decisions lie and who needs to be involved and consulted on the recommended action. This will support collaboration and create strong cross-functional ownership and delivery, which is crucial to achieving seamless, connected experiences.
• Build closer stakeholder relationships: Brands can rely heavily on third parties, particularly retailers, who often have the closest relationship with their consumers. Treat these stakeholders as partners and an extension of the brand, ensuring they are clear on the experience you are trying to deliver. Develop clear metrics and SLAs to formalise, as needed, delivery and service in line with expectations.

Depending on your starting point, this may require minor changes to ways of working or possibly more significant changes to roles, team structures and working methods. Regardless of the level of change, ensure that you manage and monitor changes to ensure they have the desired impact on the consumer experience. This will provide the support needed until new ways of working are adopted and evolved.

5. Do your teams have the right skills and mindset?

In addition to organisational aspects, brands also need to ensure that their culture, mindset, and capabilities support the delivery of channel-less commerce. Everyone in the business needs to have a ‘consumer first’ mindset rather than a ‘product first’ mindset. Given new technologies, increased digitalisation, and the introduction of AI and Generative AI mean that employees may need upskilling.

• Embed a consumer-centric culture: A consumer-first mindset across the organisation is critical. Consumer insights and needs should drive all strategies and decisions.
• Champion leadership: Senior leaders must advocate for changes, particularly in cross-team collaboration and working methods.
• Invest in training and upskilling: Moving to channel-less requires skills in new technologies, including AI and Gen AI. Given the continued speed of change, brands should monitor and provide ongoing upskilling for their people. Brands may need to ‘acquire’ new capabilities through recruitment, partnering and outsourcing.
• Embrace data and technology: Ensure teams understand and actively use new technologies and data insights. Help your colleagues be curious and desire to embrace new capabilities, with technology as a tool to augment capabilities.

Plan and execute change management strategies to facilitate the transition. This includes training, clear communication and employee involvement in the transformation process. Leaders’ focus is also important to drive, monitor, and ensure changes are embedded.

Put the consumer experience at the forefront

In summary, start with your consumer! Channel-less commerce creates a seamless, integrated consumer experience across all touchpoints for consumer brands. Achieving this requires a consumer-centric approach, robust organisational structures and ways of working, a unified data strategy and a sophisticated technical infrastructure. This is easier said than done – it requires a high degree of change to processes, technology and ways of working to gain absolute alignment and integration within and across the organisation to deliver a seamless, integrated and responsive commerce ecosystem outside the organisation. While this requires a lot of effort, the rewards will also be high as brands build consumer loyalty and meet and exceed the evolving expectations of modern consumers.