COVID and the acceleration of flexible order fulfillment in retail

To determine their strategies, retailers should always put the customer first. As a result of the pandemic, consumers are increasingly interested in safety and convenience as they shop, which is partially driving the urgency around expanding various methods of flexible order fulfillment. How that translates to their desired experience will vary by store location, the customer's age and type of product that they're purchasing (plus many other factors). 

To understand how to offer fulfillment that meets their needs, it’s important for retailers to conduct customer research leveraging their existing customer interaction data and through conducting customer experience surveys. This will help you gauge which fulfillment methods will be the most important to invest in, and how to design the operational processes and determine appropriate customer touchpoints to ensure that customer needs are met.

Related: Dark stores and test centers: Using physical retail to advance e-commerce

Traditionally, as a retailer, you’ve been focused on ensuring your inventory is available on shelves to meet in-store customer demand. Now, with your customers ordering products through online channels for either immediate availability or timely delivery, it’s increasingly important for those channels to reflect the accurate availability of products.

Technically, retailers need systems that allow them to know the number of items available at the store, where an item is within the store, when an item has been purchased and removed from the inventory count, and when an item has been returned and available for sale.

You also must set thresholds for which items can be shown as available for online fulfillment—otherwise, an item may be misplaced or in a customer's cart, and you won't be able to complete the order. Operationally, store team members need to conduct regular inventory audits and ensure that the right inventory is reflected in their counts on a near real-time basis. The frequency of execution of these audits will vary depending on your store traffic levels and availability of team members.

There will be (hopefully rare) occasions where inventory was displayed as available through an online channel upon selection and purchase, but is no longer available for fulfillment. To ensure your customer experience isn't severely impacted, you should proactively plan for ways to alert the customer and give them options for substitutions. 

During order placement, you can allow customers to select their substitution preference if it's out of stock. After order placement, you can alert customers if an item is no longer available and allow them to determine whether a substitution will suffice. These touchpoints can occur digitally or on the phone, but what’s important here is ensuring that you're high-touch throughout the process so your customers feel they're being taken care of.

The implementation of new fulfillment methods will impact your store team member roles. Whether they're the ones picking an order and delivering that order directly to the customer, or they're facilitating a third-party's execution of that fulfillment, clarity and training around new role expectations is important for successful execution.

Additionally, your team members need to be armed with the right tools to not only be alerted of new orders and expected fulfillment completion time, but to also be able to actively complete the order and communicate its status with the customer. This will ensure employees are not only able to successfully deliver on their role expectations, but that the customer is able to have their order fulfilled as expected.

It’s important for you as a retailer to ensure that, as you’re fulfilling orders, you're not disrupting the experience of your in-store shoppers. One consideration is around the employee's physical presence as they're fulfilling orders and ensuring that they’re not only trained to not disrupt the in-store shopper, but also show that they're available to help when needed.

Another consideration is the availability of on-shelf inventory for these in-store customers—you'll need to determine the best inventory to fulfill these online orders so that it doesn't take away from inventory that in-store shoppers may want to browse and purchase.

Finally, once an order has been fulfilled, inventory should be staged in an area that’s not distracting to the customer and is well organized and easily accessible for employees when final delivery to the customer is being completed.

Related: Using self-service technologies as a competitive advantage in a post-pandemic retail environment

Every so often, a disruption occurs that forces retailers to adapt to a new environment with new customer expectations. As we’ve witnessed over the past year, the pandemic has pushed retailers to think differently about how they offer increased flexibility to their customers. And while flexible order fulfillment is not a new concept, it’s also not simple to implement.

Ultimately, you’ll need to think about the overall impact of the implementation of these fulfillment methods—how to meet online customer expectations while preserving the in-store experience; how to ensure operationally and technically inventory is visible and available for sale; and how to enable store team members to effectively execute new operational expectations.

Thinking about its implementation holistically will help you ensure you're able to maintain long-term operational benefits.