Omnichannel being a popular term these days in almost every industry, lets you connect existing, siloed systems together, when in fact they’re stuck in a fomni world. Fomni is the short term for fake omnichannel – typically a collection of pointed solutions stitched together that is meant to function as single cohesive solution. Here, vendors will generally argue that manually connecting applications including ecommerce, CRM, ERP, POS, order management will make an omnichannel lemonade out of these siloed lemons.
Since each system is standalone as well as channel-specific, they are not able to truly communicate with each other in real-time or even with 100% accuracy. This makes these systems fail to deliver perfectly and enhance consumer expectations for a consistent experience across every touchpoint. Mostly based on ’80s-generation legacy ERP system as a foundation as secured over ecommerce, content management, POS and other systems; these systems were designed to give entire backing to the departmental processes, rather than the customers.
As an outcome, businesses are unable to understand their customers or turn business insights for their advantage. Further, fomni solutions also can’t supply just a single system of record for order, inventory or customer information, breaking the customer experience and further putting businesses at some disadvantage in competition.
On top of everything, keeping fomni systems running comes across as costly as well as complex. Companies have to pay a high price for IT time and resources to stitch together and successfully maintain a patchwork of siloed systems. Managing multiple licenses along with wrestling through ripple effect problems, during changes to one system also needs additional changes across other applications lead to further complications in fomni management.
Symptoms of fomni cover:
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Customers turn frustrated due to inconsistent experiences and inability to purchase anywhere, get anywhere or even return anywhere.
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Have to face lacking real-time visibility into inventory across warehouses, stores and 3PLs.
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Personnel including store associates, call center representatives and ecommerce professionals unable to see customers’ complete interaction history across all channels.
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Unintentional pricing variations across all channels due to systems lacking common foundation.
Ultimately, fomni highly impacts customer experience with a number of drawbacks. Store associates are unable to accept a merchandise return, purchased online. A customer might not be able to purchase a product online that he/she saw in a store, for it is out of the stock or the retailer might deny for ecommerce transactions. A shopper could also buy a product from a store – and two days later, gets an email suggesting the same product on a 50% off price.
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