One of the more challenging aspects to discern within a retailing organization is effective collaboration, coordination and transparency across all departments.

When each area has their own distinct system of record, meetings, goals and targets, it makes this challenge extremely vital to solve, but quite difficult to understand the path towards improvement.  With so many moving parts, it is very easy for each department to keep moving at lightning speed towards their own goals without looking up to see if counterparts in other areas have been impacted or should be involved in the resolution.  Just as an orchestra without a conductor and sheet music, even a collection of the most talented individuals will sound like conflicting noise.

Each department’s success is critically dependent on coordinated efforts across key initiatives.  Below are examples of typical cross-silo interactions that can impact every retailer’s efficacy:

• Marketing and Merchandising need to collaborate to ensure the inventory is available to support upcoming marketing campaigns and those campaigns are showcasing products that are in stock and highly available.  More specifically, should pages be modified to address bounce concerns while campaign is in flight?  Is the messaging consistent throughout campaign and website?  And are products highlighted within campaigns easily found and searched?
• Merchandising and Operations need to coordinate on returns that yield high return rates.  Are products getting poor reviews due to shipping issues?  Are sizing guides inaccurate?  Are product images and descriptions truly reflective of the product delivered?   
• CRM and Operations need to align on the customer delivery experience to all customers, especially VIP and highly profitable customers.  Are orders being held, partially shipped, delayed beyond promised delivery date or worse, cancelled by the warehouse, thus causing a drop in customer satisfaction?  How and should the CRM team communicate to customers who have had a poor operational experience?
• Merchants and Buyers/Planners work together on promotional activities and the website changes to support fluctuating inventory (order accelerations or delays).   Can orders of upcoming inventory be rerouted via a different delivery method, if inventory is not expected to be expedited?  Should product detail pages be modified to reflect a new pricing or markdown strategy?   

As was discussed in Tipping Point Tuesday, the new re-imagined week should rely on technology that instantly sifts through data to surface key actionable opportunities every single day.  Not only are these opportunities valuable because they save time for your diligent (yet exhausted) analyst team, but they are valuable because they sync multiple areas of the business that in turn highlight the necessity for cross-department collaboration:

• Increase paid search for products that are overstocked, with not enough viewers.
• Email campaigns customized to customers who are most profitable, yet have not purchased in the last year.
• Description changes for products with high return rates due to sizing and fit issues.

All of these opportunities have the potential to surface “low-hanging” revenue for the business, but require collaboration and coordination to prioritize and accomplish.

Retailers have invested quite heavily in the systems that will optimize each department of the business.  Huge budgets have been allocated toward marketing optimization software, supply chain systems, forecasting and planning models; however, with all of this investment, the majority of departments are rarely aware of timing or activation of various initiatives in other silos.  Higher returns due to sizing could indicate that the sizing guide and description for a specific designer needs to be amended, but who in the organization is actually taking the ownership of this issue and more importantly, when is the task completed, so teams can evaluate if the action resolved this original issue?  How would someone on the site merchandising team know that a modification was made to a paid search campaign in order to garner more traffic to the category of products they oversee?  When should that merchandiser expect the increase in traffic?  Identification of these opportunities, which rely on cross-department transparency, is only a part of the challenge; it is necessary to delegate accountability in order to deliver and complete these coordinated tasks.

In my experience, an organization with a more effective, collaborative approach does not create additional meetings with copious people involved.   They require their business to clearly define and allocate accountability as to what should be done, by whom and by when.  This accountability not only drives effective action in the organization, but it also creates a common goal across all departments so that every team is moving towards their target in a cohesive way for connected impact. Lastly, through employing these essential methods, it ensures a clear view on what is being acted upon throughout the week providing a platform for collaboration that is not focused on debating the problems, but rather encouraging efficient, strategic and coordinated resolution.