BY DAVID MALONEY, SENIOR EDITOR
VOICE
IN THE BRAVE NEW WORLD OF RETAIL
distribution, companies must be flexible, accurate, and fast. That’s especially true for those
involved in omnichannel distribution, where
retail, wholesale, catalog, and direct-to-consumer orders may be processed and shipped
from the same facility. These retailers must
adjust to new ways of doing business.
“If you look at the attributes of omnichannel, it increases complexity, decreases order
size, and puts a burden on retailers to do distribution in a more cost-effective way,” says
Ron Kubera, senior vice president and general
manager of voice company Vocollect, a division of Honeywell.
Keith Phillips, president and CEO at voice
provider Voxware, reports that when retailers
first move into multichannel fulfillment, they
often discover that their distribution is not as
efficient as it should be. “The biggest challenge
to omnichannel is that many retailers do not
do their fulfillment that well,” he says. “Where
they are failing is not on the shopping experi-
ence, but on the fulfillment. What used to be
seen as a necessary evil is now a critical part of
the overall customer experience.”
HEAR FOR THE TAKING
With its reputation for speed, flexibility, and
accuracy, voice technology offers retailers a
way to address the complexity of the omnichannel environment. “Their number one
technologyreview
We talked to the industry’s top voice system
providers to see how voice aligns with the new
retail distribution realities.
a perfect fit
for omnichannel distribution
VOICE:
