How to Choose an Omnichannel Provider

While omnichannel order management systems offer a lot of benefits to retail and eCommerce businesses, you can’t just pick one at random and hope for the best. Each OMS comes equipped with different features and levels of support from the provider — and not all are designed to fit seamlessly into your operations.  

Choosing the right omnichannel provider can be difficult if you don’t know exactly what you need, though. That’s why we’ve compiled a shortlist of 4 features you need to consider when selecting an omnichannel OMS provider.  

Scalability

Whether you need to rapidly scale to meet customer demand, or you’re ramping up in preparation for peak season, the ability to scale your omnichannel operations is critical. Without scale, you can quickly find yourself struggling to keep up with customer orders.

On the other hand, having an omnichannel provider (like Radial) that helps you scale every aspect of your supply chain — from inventory management to fulfillment and shipping logistics — you can stay one step ahead of your customers. In fact, with Radial, you can scale your fulfillment up or down at any time of the year. And you don’t have to sacrifice your personal touch to do it. Radial’s fulfillment specialists make sure your orders look great and get to your customers on-time, every time — no matter where they’re headed.  

Support

As you well know, customers often have questions or run into issues when buying or returning a product. That means having a customer support team in place is an absolute must. 

There are times of the year when support tickets and customer inquiries can get overwhelming for in-house support teams, though. And unless you have a way to scale your customer support operations, you can quickly find your business tagged in a lot of negative reviews. 

Luckily, there are omnichannel OMS providers that offer a customer care team. Radial is one of them. Operating as an extension of your current customer support team, Radial Customer Care helps you answer your customers’ questions and solve critical problems using lots of different channels, including social media, text messages, live chat, phone calls, and emails. 

This means you can continue to deliver amazing customer support at any time of the year, without burning out your in-house team. 

Inventory Optimization

Inventory management would be so much easier if you could pinpoint which products would be popular and know exactly how many items you needed to meet customer demand. Not only would it eliminate the risk of overstock, but it would guarantee that your customers would never see an “out of stock” label again. 

Unfortunately, no omnichannel solution can perfectly predict those numbers. But the right omnichannel provider can get you really close by helping you see and analyze your customers’ data. For example, Radial’s precision-based inventory forecasting features allow you to see which products are in demand, when customers are buying them, which locations and channels are driving the most sales, and why there’s a demand for those products in the first place. 

This data enables you to maximize profits, by showing you what’s working and helping you make smarter inventory management decisions. 

Speed

Most customers expect their orders to arrive in 1-2 days — even during peak season. And most of the time, they’re pretty unforgiving if orders have a longer shipping time or arrive late. 

This puts a lot of pressure on retail and eCommerce businesses, especially during holidays and major sales. 

But with the right omnichannel provider, you can keep up with customer expectations easily, no matter how busy your fulfillment centers (or your carriers) are. In fact, with a provider like Radial, you can both pinpoint the best route to fulfill individual customer orders and access premier shipping carriers, who can get your orders to customers faster. 

All in all, this means happier customers and more relaxed employees. 

While a great omnichannel provider can make a world of difference to your inventory, fulfillment, and order management operations — it can be difficult to find one. However, by looking specifically at the speed, scalability, support, and inventory optimization capabilities of shortlisted omnichannel providers, you’ll be much better able to recognize the right one when you see it.