Appriss Retail recently brought together a group of 10 senior retail executives for a closed-door discussion on total retail loss. These were VP-level leaders across loss prevention, finance, operations, e-commerce and customer experience; they’re the minds behind the business and how to plug retail loss.

A question was posed: Who operates from a shared loss strategy with centralized data visible across all departments? One hand went up. One out of 10.

This isn’t global research, rather an anecdote from Appriss Retail’s closed-door Takeback Talks offerings, but it speaks volumes. Silos remain a serious problem. When the retail industry is dealing with $706 billion in annual returns and $90 billion in shrink losses, retailers must find ways to collaborate. The problem isn’t data. It’s silos.

What is Total Loss Visibility?

There’s a pattern among retailers that can lead to serious fragmentation. In-store teams operate separate from e-commerce. Customer service operates alone. Then, compounding the issue, each group treats returns as a customer experience, shrink as loss prevention, and operational loss as a supply chain issue.

Silos abound. Each department then develops its own strategy, building its own data stack, designing its own dashboards, and defining its own measurables.

Unified loss visibility requires what most organizations haven’t built: a shared data layer that streamlines transactions, incidents and consumer behavior across every channel — stores, e-commerce and customer service — in one place. This isn’t a weekly data export or a monthly reconciliation. It’s a real-time, continuous view of data.

Loss prevention can see the same consumer behavior that finance is trying to understand. Operations can see shrink patterns happening at the store level that they previously couldn’t surface systematically. Customer experience leaders can make return policy decisions with full visibility into what those decisions cost.

Retailers that treat total loss as a series of department-level metrics aren’t reaching this level of collaboration. Total loss visibility is directly tied to retailers understanding that loss is a shared business problem.

Why the Hold Up?

Among the 10 leaders in the room for the Takeback Talks session, the executives were candid about what’s holding back organizations from cross-channel collaboration. A whiteboard of reasons included:

  • Ownership or total loss not having a single budget leader.
  • Shrink and returns get separated depending on the org chart.
  • No motivation to build a shared infrastructure.

Another hurdle is normalization. Total retail loss gets built into forecasts and becomes an acceptable “cost of doing business” rather than a measurable, manageable operational risk. Companies view $90 billion in shrink as a line item vs. asking whether 73 percent of it was preventable.

Data Foundations Fuel Change

Retailers can buckle down on losses in a few ways. First, operationally. A lot of retail loss is an execution problem — inconsistent associate training, partner compliance gaps, and process breakdowns at the store level. But data also needs to be unified and used as a foundation of total loss.

This highlights that a lot of loss isn’t a technology issue. Research from IBM found that 83 percent of organizations report that data silos undermine cross-departmental innovation. In retail, where loss touches loss prevention, finance, operations and e-commerce simultaneously, the fragmentation adds up.

Getting total loss onto the C-suite agenda will lead to cross-departmental metrics, enterprise-level thinking and collaboration. The one executive in the think tank said it wasn’t software that made the company successful but that it had all departments and data aligned on a shared scope of the problem and a commitment to measuring it together.

That’s one retailer in 10 with a shared loss strategy. The other nine were still managing loss from disparate spreadsheets, working toward different objectives. Silos don’t solve losses, but cross-channel collaboration around a shared goal can.

This article was originally published by Total Retail, which is the sister brand of Women in Retail Leadership Circle.

Sarah Cascone is chief marketing officer at Appriss Retail, the total retail loss solution for omnichannel retailers.