Omni-Channel is not an easy conversation to approach, since a brand’s customer and their experience are at the heart of the matter. One’s strategy must consider so many factors, including  creating a consistent conversation with your customer across all channels, both in-store and online. This is no easy feat: making product available on all channels and creating a seamless customer experience that is both comprehensive and holistic is increasingly challenging in the digital age. CFDA hosted a NETWORK. conversation with leading experts to address the subject. It featured Jason Epstein, Senior Vice President of Operations at alice + olivia; Tamara Gruzbarg, Head of Industry Insights at ActionIQ; Paul Healion, CTO & Co-Founder at One Rockwell; Scott Lux, Vice President of Ecommerce and Digital Marketing at Intermix; Nick Molnar, Co-Founder and CEO of Afterpay, and Frank Weil, Chief Customer Officer of KWI. Here are our key takeaways from the panel discussion:

• There are great marketing operational tools like ActionIQ, which enables you to empower the data you collect. It also helps you figure out how to talk to you customer as well as identify your next best customer.
• Tag everything! Every action the customer takes produces information that you want to utilize to create a customer experience. Think about how you plan on capturing that information.
• Data and planning are key to laying a foundation to get the information that you need. This allows you to get on the road to being truly omni-channel, and give you a 360-degree view of your customer.

• By gathering data, you can roll out features and functionalities that will help you engage with your customer in a deeper way.
• Create a single customer record across all channels so you can understand their behavior beyond a single transaction.
• The best omni-channel experience is not just about the transaction, but the representation of the brand both in store and online.

• Organizationally, it’s important to have internal conversations so there is no longer a silo-ed retail, ecommerce and digital team. It’s about all departments working together to solve the customer experience.
• The lifetime value of an omni-channel customer is at least twice the value of a single channel customer.
• There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Everyone’s omni-channel strategy should be tailored to their business strategy.