Dive Brief:

• Reflektion, provider of an artificial Intelligence-driven customer engagement platform has aligned with Mad Mobile to have its capabilities, including online shopping data, featured in the Mad Mobile’s unified commerce platform for retail clients of both companies, according to a Reflektion press release.

• The partnership will allow retailers to unify the data-rich world of e-commerce with the data-scarce world of offline, in-store retail, Reflektion said. Retailers using Mad Mobile’s solution can tap into online shopping data from Reflektion, enabling them to leverage a single, shared data set to seamlessly connect promotions, schedules, experiences and insights; gaining a complete understanding of the end-to-end customer journey.

• “We’re committed to transforming retail with mobile solutions that empower store associates to engage with customers, enhance the in-store shopping experience and sell more effectively,” Bruce Bennett, CEO of Mad Mobile, said in a statement. “By creating this alliance with Reflektion, we’re able to provide store associates with an enriched, real-time view of each individual customer as they walk in the door.”

Dive Insight:

Bennett's statement gets right to the heart of what retailers and their store employees really need to make omnichannel work (something few retailers are actually doing well).

It's hard for retailers to make good on promises about supporting omnichannel shopping experiences if they can’t get a clear picture of customers’ online shopping activities and put that information into a mobile format handy enough for store associates to access it when the customer’s shopping journey has moved from online or mobile to physical stores.

A number of retailers, including Ashley Furniture, Aeropostale, Books-A-Million and Talbot’s, among others, already are using Mad Mobile’s mobile Retail Concierge solution to help their store associates conduct inventory checks for customers and follow through on in-store order fulfillment, the latter application being the kind of thing coming into increasing demand as brick-and-mortar stores continue to revamp their central functions to remain relevant.

Reflektion’s platform for enabling shopping insights has been quite popular with some well-known brands, including Disney, Godiva, Sur la Table, TOMS and Marmot.

The fact that both of these companies are well-established in the market is great for them individually. However, the nature of what omnichannel strategies are trying to accomplish — in reaching across once separate shopping channels, each with their own unique sets of shopping behaviors and deep data pools — requires either a large technology partner or an ecosystem of talented specialists from different parts of the sector that are willing to work together and integrate their solutions.