INspiring the customer
Extracts from Trust Systems' recent white paper - 'Inspiring the Customer moving away from historical retail customer experience to one that is personal, relevant and excites.' that reviews the role that technology plays in a retailer's transformation strategy.
This is due to the rise in digital technology, the ever-changing customer expectations and the need to connect with in-store colleagues to ensure your retail business thrives vs just survive.
Bringing technology and strategy together is vital to any return on investment (ROI) and return on objectives (ROO) for current retailers transformation programmes. As a retailer you are bombarded by new ideas, technology advancements, new trends all telling you how best to service and keep your customers. Before you implement technology for technology sake ensure you take a step back and consider.
What does success look like? Is it to reduce costs and provide better value to your customers? Is it to increase spend each time a customer visits your store? Are you wanting to drive customer loyalty with customers coming back time and time again? Fundamental to all of these objectives is ensuring a customer’s shopping experience is enjoyable and as easy as possible whether they are in -store, online or on their phone. But what happens if you choose a technology to enhance the customer experience in one area, but then need to change focus and strategy? Simply, the technology you select needs to be agile and flexible to evolve with your customer and business needs.
Understanding Your Customers
Do you truly understand your customer? Are you making the most of the intel you have? Do you use your store to the best it can be to gather the best intel? Can you harness all the relevant data at store level?
How about your in-store colleagues? Are they engaged, informed and excited to work for you and serve your customers?
Customers are fickle and their priorities are effortless service, basically 'what is in it for me'. This coupled with an array of technologies available from click and collect, flexible payments, self-service, and many more - as a retailer you need clarity in your objectives – what does your customer want, what will make that customer buy from you, return to buy more etc. Then you can consider what is the ultimate technology game changer to ensure your choices deliver business benefits.
So where will you start? Digital technology is a pivotal enabler for any business transformation strategy - true. Bricks and mortar remain a crucial element of the consumer journey – true. eCommerce is vital to your business – true. Your customers demand a seamless omnichannel experience – true.
How can technology unlock the potential to differentiate your brand to not only compete on the high street and online, but thrive?
In an ever-evolving technological world your business is more than likely to have an existing multi-supplier network for delivering IT with legacy systems in place. The question is how does this current infrastructure support your need and desire to drive new digital technology? Are you unsure whether to utilise what you have already or to invest in new? All this is compounded by the need for innovation and speed being essential in today’s retail world.
We see it as a digital transformation journey to success. This can be done in stages or implemented as a whole, it is what is right for your business and ultimately your customer. No point implementing a till-less store if your customers don’t want to shop this way or understand this mode of shopping. The key is understanding your business, your customers, and your colleagues to deliver a personalised offering that is valued and connects the experience across the store and other digital channels whilst ensuring your investment choices are future-proof and ready to implement in weeks or months not years.
This paper looks at mapping the customer experience with transformation as the key focus, but at the right points. The differentiator will be how close you can connect with your customer, how agile, scalable and robust your solutions are and whilst remembering to ensure you empower your in-store colleagues.
The following diagram shows how we at Trust see digital transformation as a journey. The starting point can be anywhere based on where you can deliver the most value to your customer and therefore to your business. From here you can continue on the journey and build, build, build business benefits.
Digital Transformation Journey to Success
There are many research papers, models, ideas available, the model that we feel brings technology and strategy together is the ‘nine elements of digital transformation’ as illustrated below. It gives a clear journey for success for retailers.
Customer Understanding
Customer knowledge and more importantly understanding helps deliver a better service. But there are many ways to deliver this. By giving customers the tools and information you move from robotically serving them to adding value with what they want whether that is guidance, information or independence.
This makes selling easy and moves customers to become your brand ambassadors. Dependent on your product/service the following may be relevant for your customers, the point is with the right technology you can support your strategy to deliver, a combination of these or all of these, whatever is right for your customers.
Guidance: Through technology you can deliver guidance in multiple ways from an information hub in-store and online, to giving in-store colleagues information at their finger tips.
Customer Touchpoints
All retailers have a mass of data, turning this data into intelligence with technology can deliver better connected customers and in-store colleagues. Getting this right soon saves money, increase sales, enhances efficiency, and elevates your brand to stand out from the crowd ultimately delivering an extraordinary experience.
However many of these objectives can feel like demands when you don’t have the right technology. To avoid being pulled in the wrong direction it is crucial you unravel the key priorities and deliver quickly. Improving the customer experience starts with your in-store colleagues. Empower your team and make them want to work for you and this will spill out into the service they provide your customers, they will deliver a greater level of service because they have the right tools and are engaged in their work. With pressure to reduce costs and wages you need to think out-side the box. People are driven if they are happy and entrusted to make decisions, question is do your in-store colleagues have the tools to deliver this?
Give something to your customers, promotions, special events are all common in today’s retail environment. But are you ensuring yours are relevant to your customers. For example, if you have an offer on an animal-based product and send an email to your customer, but they are a vegetarian this creates a view of irrelevance. Having a rules-based CRM that is current will ensure you are relevant and timely. Having location and presence data enables you to promote and interact with your customers whilst they shop, thus leading to more positive outcomes. This level of personalisation can make the customer feel special.
Technology can add excitement to the customers experience and help you differentiate and stand out from competitors. Whether this is creating retail theatre through the combination of in-store digital displays and customers personal digital devices. It is important that you have the tools at your disposal to make these work in tandem therefore influence your customers behaviour in real-time. Advertising different things on different mediums will only lead to customers being confused.
Furthermore, ensuring in-store colleagues are fully informed and communicating personalised messages to your customers are an important part of any digital transformation. Any customer facing solution must be fully integrated throughout the business bringing together a full omnichannel experience.
For example, if a customer wants to buy a product that is not ranged in a store an in-store colleague should be able to offer the customer and complete a transaction to deliver to store, collect from another store, deliver direct to home or to a chosen pick-up location. Going the extra mile for customers in this way will differentiate you from your competition. Topline Growth Mechanisms that encourage a customer to enter your store, make a purchase, increase basket size and ultimately ensures your customers return will automatically lead to topline growth.
Whether you choose a technology to overlay your enterprise WiFi to promote offers and information to customers personal devices (with or without complimentary digital display media) the technology has to be agile so your communications are relevant and timely. There are many macro influences on shopping trends it is vital to understand your current stock position, competitor pricing to deliver and update promotions in real-time. Relevance is everything.
The use of customer engagement over WiFi in sync with digital displays can really bring your brand to life whilst updating customers with real-time information. How you use digital screens can lead to wowing your customers with engaging visuals and videos, giving them a reason to come back to your store and not your competitors.
Trust Systems Limited has been partnering for many years with leading retailers such as with Aldi, Co-op, Holland & Barrett and Waterstones.
It is a provider of digital consultancy, managed services and technology focussed on helping customers make the most of the opportunity technology provides. With headquarters in Cirencester it has over 15 years’ experience of bringing innovative technology to business reality.
