One third of firms have no mobile or social commerce capability, study finds
A new survey has shown that almost one third of companies still have no social or mobile commerce solutions in place.
The research by cloud integrator CloudSense revealed that 32% of companies admitted to being behind the curve on social and mobile commerce, with 13% saying that they had no plans to implement social or mobile commerce in the future.
The survey also quizzed respondents about the greatest challenges in the sales process, where almost one third of respondents said that a lack of a single view of the customer was their greatest sales challenge. In addition 40% of respondents picked out the complexity of products and services as their biggest difficulty within the sales process.
The CloudSense survey found that almost 31% of brands did not know how many errors occurred each week in their order management system. 11% claimed that their system had over 100 errors per week, inaccuracies which represent a significant drain on resources and profitability.
Never Miss a Retail Update!When asked to identify the biggest advantages of a multi-channel approach, brands pointed to the benefits of improved customer experience (40%), increasing total sales (31%) and enjoying a single view of the customer (29%).
Respondents also gave insight into the lack of formal processes which exist between marketing and sales teams, with 48% of those questioned revealing that they had no formal process for sharing ideas and feedback. Just 16% of brands have a central repository for new ideas, and only 13% use enterprise social media as a sharing and collaboration tool for new ideas.
“Our findings show that many businesses are already missing out on revenue because they do not have mobile and social commerce solutions in place, and without action the gap between them and their competitors is only going to grow,” said Richard Britton, managing director, CloudSense.
He continued: “There is a perception in some businesses that these technologies are not yet mature, but the hard reality is that their competitors are already making profit from these channels.
“A multi-channel approach has already enabled forward-thinking brands to get ahead of the competition and grow revenue significantly through increased sales. But the barrier for many firms is that they still don’t have the right technology in place, so a multi-channel sales approach remains a challenge rather than an opportunity. Our results show that multi-channel sales are coming of age, so these firms need to catch up very quickly if they don’t want to be left behind by their competitors.”
