The omnichannel experience is essentially broken: Apoorv Durga

The e4m MarTech Summit saw a day filled with sessions that were insightful and centred around current developments in marketing and advertising technologies, as well as how agencies and brands were becoming future ready.

The day culminated with a closing keynote session by Apoorv Durga, VP, Research & Advisory, Real Story Group on "Future-Proofing Your Martech Stack". Over the half-hour session, Durga examined the key components of a system which is future ready, core functions supported by a flexible marketing structure and key attributes of an agile organisation.

Starting the session with a quick poll, Durga asked how many in the audience were troubled by constant messages from credit card companies and other services reminding you to pay your services while also telling you to ignore the messages if you've already paid. "I've always wondered why you need to have a disclaimer if your omnichannel systems are in place. So, there is clearly a disconnect between their messaging platform and the platform which has my payment information, and the systems aren't integrated in real time," he elaborated.

Durga said that as we move further into the 2020s there is a need to take into account how to better omnichannel experiences while also being cognizant of shifting stack architecture as companies continue to build up their foundation services and MarTech stacks for the new decade.

Noting that the omnichannel experience, especially in India is essentially broken, Durga cited a personal example of having ordered a number of items from a leading retailer’s craft website, which he was supposed to pick up from its brick and mortar store, having already paid in advance. However, on reaching the store, he was informed that 50% of the items were already out of stock. So clearly there is a lack of communication between the many different channels of even giant organizations.

"I'm sure you all have your experiences of omnichannel failures with messages having outdated information, coupon codes on your email not working on the company's app and so on, so this is something that needs to be addressed critically," said Durga as he took the audience through even more instances of the same.

A point to be noted, he said, was that customers often have multiple online identities, whether its personal or official emails, different phone numbers and so on. “There is no easy way for companies to track your different online profiles and IDs and so that makes the problem even more complex,” he said.

This is often because companies use the same stack infrastructure and services. Some data shows us that a typical enterprise often employs up to 90-odd platforms, all which make up different subsets and have different functions, coming to make up a typical stack infrastructure. The problem is that each of these subsets are silos in themselves and that means each of these boxes have their own rules, customer data profiles and so forth, and so that is something that needs to be addressed as well," he said.

Apart from the need to remove these silos, Durga added that it was important to avoid experiences, content and rules that are very platform specific as this leads to that dissonance in customer information. "So, you need to rethink whether it makes sense to have all those capabilities at a higher level or a foundational level. Essentially you need to rethink your stack to make it more customer-centric rather than enterprise-centric. That really is the key message," he concluded.