Where vanilla marketing tools take days or months to develop relationships, real-time technology can do it in seconds, says Aneesh Reddy, Co-founder and CEO of Bangalore-based Capillary Technologies. It works beautifully by breaking the competition clutter and gratifying the customer instantly, every time she is at store. Today, retailers can reach the right customers at the right time with the right communication, using real-time technology and its tools like mobile phones (the instant media which most of the customer carry all the time), tablets and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Imagine if you walk into a store and the retailer already knows who you are and what you like, and promptly recommends the products you are likely to buy. Sounds too good to be true? Sure, your local grocer might be able to do this, but for large retailers it simply isn’t possible to know each customer that well. That’s where the real-time technology comes to the rescue.
With the growing customer base of a retailer and competition, personalisation of service to each customer’s needs becomes difficult. The best time to reach the customer and influence her purchase decision is when she is at your store. This can be done more effectively with a personalised touch, powered by technology and analytics.
The ‘Instant’ Connection
Most customer loyalty programmes communicate with customers when they are not in store. As a result, they have limited attention span and a weak recall towards the brand’s loyalty programme and communication. No matter what the retailers do, the truth remains that once out of their store, the customer won’t remember for long what offers were running at the outlet or the points she gained while shopping.
On the other hand, if a customer gets her points balance and relevant offers through SMS/email communication while she is still shopping at the store, the possibility of her response increases multi-fold. This can boost your up-sell and cross-sell efforts significantly since not only is the communication targeted to the right customer, but it also has the advantage of reaching her during the time when she is the most susceptible to offers. In my experience, real-time engagement of customers has proved this every time by generating ROI within the first six weeks of the launch and increasing sales by 1–2 percent within 6–12 months of implementation.
For instance, if a customer buys only a formal shirt and the retailer is able to use a real-time recommendation tool to inform her that just for that day, she will get an additional 15 percent discount if she also buys formal trousers of some brand, it is very likely she will respond to the offer. This way, the retailer would be able to cross-sell and monetises the current visit of the customer when she has a high propensity to shop. This is a visibly better approach than sending her an offer later, and expecting her to travel to the store, find parking, and come browse through the products to find something she likes.
In the first scenario, the customer is already in your store, buying something which she needs and would not mind an offer on a co-related product. This can also be used
for building the frequency of the customer by sending her targeted communication whenever she visits a particular store. With the use of customer clustering and life cycle modeling, a response-stimuli model can be built for targeting the customer with relevant communication (read stimuli) at different points of her association with the brand.
Many retailers in India have already adopted and are benefitting from real-time customer engagement. One of India’s largest shirt brands recently launched a real-time customer engagement campaign, sending recommendations to customers in-store via SMSes, based on their current purchase and past transactions. During the campaign period, we noticed that about 15 percent of the customers used the cross-sells effectively. At the end of the campaign, the stores recorded a 4 percent increase in sales.
Customer Delight
Every retailer wants a long-term relationship with customers and have them come back for years. The key to achieve this is simple – keep your customers delighted. The “WOW” factor is what brings in the difference. And what does the customer want? She simply wants to know that her favorite retailer is thinking about her, appreciates her and knows what she would like.
Targeted, personalized campaigns enhance customer delight while impersonal, bulk communication fails to create a positive impact. The right communication at the right time with the use of advanced technology and superior analytics is the best real-time relationship marketing practice. This not only saves customers precious time, but also makes shopping at the stores a delightful experience.
Smart learning, Fast earning
While talking about real-time customer engagement, retailers are always skeptical about a few things like, why conventional in-store communication tools like VM won’t create the same impact? The answer is, in this quick-changing market, the retail communication needs to be instant, targeted and precise.
With little training about real-time engagement applications, you can drive customer loyalty through your store staff by making them enablers, while saving on the huge cost attached with running campaigns the conventional way. This helps the cashier record transactions, give instant suggestions and recommendations and make the customer’s experience delightful.
Mobile communication and social connectivity make for a smart and interactive platform to build an instant relationship with your customers in-store by sending them the right communication. Moreover, as these tools are automated, it doesn’t require any decision making practice from the cashier side.
With more and more brands embracing real-time customer engagement, its important not to leave this tool out of your arsenal while designing your customer experience.
*This article was originally published in August 2012 issue of Images Retail.
