Tag: Personalization

Posted on

Taking customers by the hand

couple holding hands while walking on sand

The retail world has pivoted since the COVID-19 Pandemic in many parts of the world. Despite the fact that brick and mortar stores won’t entirely disappear, the nature of how businesses engage and transact with the public for the exchange of goods has transformed and will likely evolve further.

The impact has been palpable and pervasive; home delivery services for groceries, fast food and the like have mushroomed, accompanied by the proliferation of services and mobile apps and websites to support order capture. Vendors have had to either build or buy services to integrate and the impact on the back office has been varied.

Market analysts even say that the e-commerce industry itself will be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the coronavirus pandemic. Penetration rates, which are currently at around 15%, are expected to increase to 25% by 2025 (MarketWatch, 2020). A 67% increase in a short five years.

Product and service vendors have never before had this much opportunity for insight into customer behaviour and the same time the opportunity to influence what others will buy or use. The opportunity is extraordinary for those who are ready to seize it and who have the data and intent on gathering data.

It is important then, to consider the impact that all this has on the potential for customer retention and loyalty. Consumers have even more choices now, and their decision to buy is going to be influenced by product and service availability, price, past and anticipated quality and brand and business placement.

All indications in industry statistics suggest that existing customers may easily jump ship in response to finding your price higher than that of others for ostensibly generic goods and services or as a result of a bad purchase experience.

Conversely, if your business makes bold use of testimonials, has a high upvote or customer satisfaction rating on shared platforms and has good reviews, then the chances of you poaching customers from others is greater. You also have better potential in building a larger loyal customer base and being placed higher in search rankings

There is a lot of noise and interference to now contend with, as a consumer, so this makes attracting new customers increasingly difficult – will they hear your message? The choices are plentiful and unless you have a niche offering, quality is potentially less impactful. Where you are likely to really win, is on message, a customized and closer interaction experience with your customers and superior service and strong past customer recommendations and reviews. 

Brand becomes of heightened importance

Customer actions, a product or service or vendor rating, the use of referrals and referral concessions and coupons, social media sharing, viral brand-related content sharing and advocacy- they’re all super important under ordinary circumstances.

With at least 10% of any given workforce now potentially working from home or in a hybrid setting at least, there is much more of an opportunity to get their attention. Using these elements of how people express sentiment and their favour in relation to brands is essential to build and understand.

These same customers will be looking for personalization of every interaction that they have with your brand – In 2018 Bazaarvoice found that 50% of shoppers  felt a personalized online experience is important. Almost three-quarters of marketers around the same time, according to Evergage, also believe personalization has a “strong” or “extreme” impact on advancing customer relationships.

The demographic of your customers likely will also be different to what you might have had in conventional retail. For example, a 2020 Shopify survey found that two out of every three (67 percent) consumers aged 18 to 34 are spending more money purchasing items online now than before the pandemic; their behaviour has therefore changed.

There has been a change for older age groups too. Consumers from 35 to 54 years of age increased their online shopping expenditure by 57% and 41% for consumers aged 55 and above.

To achieve an understanding and develop a customer brand advocacy program your business needs data to help identify advocates and influencers and unpaid spokesmen and referrers. The best bet for building and managing this data is by using a centralized customer master data management system like that offered by Pretectum.

You’ll want to take the data that a customer provides you with and harness it for future communications, to extend offers, provide promotional messages and of course, hone, refine and customize the customer’s experience every time they visit your website, your storefront or a system that you have, that they might need access to. A solid execution plan will have this data held centrally in a hub that disseminates it to whoever and wherever it needs to be; webshop, support portal, billing system and even point of sales and mobile app.

With the Pretectum CMDM your business has the flexibility of deciding what you want to track and of course who you want to track and why.

Posted on

Making wishes come true

white dandelion flower shallow focus photography

Make people who aren’t your customers wish that they were. Sounds easy right? We know it is easier to say it than it is to make it happen but we do have some thoughts about how the way you interact with your customers and prospects may just influence them in a way you hadn’t considered.

“Even the best of what formerly passed for good customer service is no longer enough” – we’re sure you agree, that the way your customers have come to expect personal interaction, is radically different today as compared with what it likely looked like even just a year ago. 

The reality is that your customers are evolving, and with them, their expectations. Today, every member of your sales, support, and service team needs to function as a customer concierge. 

A concierge ([kɔ̃sjɛʁʒ]) is an employee of a multi-tenant building, such as a hotel or apartment building, who receives guests. The concept has been applied more generally to other hospitality settings and to personal concierges who manage the errands of private clients. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concierge

Even if your business isn’t in hospitality, your staff need to do everything they can, to make every prospect and customer, feel recognized, acknowledged, appreciated, and heard. They all want to feel special 

As Gary Vaynerchuk, states in The Thank You Economy – “You have to make them feel special, just like when your great-grandmother walked into Butcher Bob’s shop or bought her new hat, and you need to make people who aren’t your customers wish they were.”

So how exactly can your business do that?

At Pretectum, we think the answer lies in the data. If you have the data, you can leverage it.

Three circles with CMDM at the center.
Three circles with CMDM at the center.

If you don’t have the data, you can embark on a data gathering and data collection exercise that will empower your teams and fuel your technologies for improved messaging and personalization – customizing the whole customer experience in a way that is aligned with their preferences, passions, and interests.

With the Pretectum CMDM solution, you’re able to take advantage of a platform that supports centrally managed customer master data for small or large groups in a unified or an isolated way, according to the specific way in which your business prefers to have data governance organized.

Forging good customer relations

In retail good customer relations include remembering and appreciating repeat customers, creating local connections with shoppers, putting product knowledge to good use, and of course much more. A great deal of this can be augmented with data that your business has in relation to those customers provided you take the trouble to capture it and harvest insights from it.

If you’ve ever spent any time dealing with an older established department store you will know that many of them have staff who are “personal shoppers” – people who help others shop by giving advice and making suggestions.

You’ll still find them in some high-end stores but of course, smaller retailers can do this themselves simply by training their retail staff to be more attentive and personalized and less transactional. Personal shoppers are often employed by department stores and boutiques, although some are freelance or work exclusively online.

Often with a focus particularly on apparel, the reality though, is that personal shopping can also apply to non-clothing retail – such as furniture, and specialized fields like electronics, vehicles, and travel – offering personal shopping services is on the rise.

As consumers, we will tend to appreciate the store owner who remembers the repeat customer. One of the easiest ways to support your staff in being able to do that is by providing customers with a unique way of being identified, like a loyalty card; and storing essential information that relates to the relationship with the customer in a point of sale, service or support system.

At the swipe or scan of a card or phone, your staff can surprise and delight key customers with personalized service which will drive positive retention. All your repeat “known” customers are likely to be your best ones’s they’ll be very appreciative of a retail experience that is finely attuned to them and their loyalty

So, make it a point to let your frequent customers know that you’re grateful for their purchases by taking advantage of the data that you have about them, every time you interact with them.

Put all that info you have in your CDP, CRM, and ERP to good use by augmenting your systems with a single source of customer truth – a customer master data management system.

Once you have their information you’ll be sure to be able to use that customer data to serve your customers better.

The customer experience is more than important ever. You’re doing business in an environment where consumers have more choices than they have ever had before. How you interact with them can be a huge differentiating factor and it can turn indifferent shoppers into raving fans.