One of the great benefits customer lifecycle programs bring to the party is unearthing cross-divisional or functional profitability opportunities that otherwise would fall into the cracks between units and not be addressed. What I think most managers in the omni-channel space may not realize (yet) is how significant many of these issues can be.
To provide some context for those purely interested in the marketing side, this idea joins quite closely to the optimizing for worst customers and sales cannibalization discussions, but is more concerned with downstream operational issues and finance. Cost shifting scenarios will become a lot more common as omnichannel concepts pick up speed.
Shifty Sales OK, Costs Not?
Why is cost shifting important to understand? Many corporate cultures can easily tolerate sales shifting between channels because of the view that “any sale is good”. On the ground, this means sourcing sales accurately in an omni-channel environment requires too much effort relative to the perceived benefits to be gained. Fair enough; some corporate cultures simply believe any sale is a good sale even if they lose money on it!
Cost shifting tends to be a different story though, because the outcomes show up as budget variances and have to be explained. In many ways, cost shifting is also easier to measure, because the source is typically simple to capture once the issue surfaces. And as a cultural issue, people are used to the concept of dealing with budget variances.
Here’s a common case: