We conducted a survey of our customers and a global analysis of the retail market. Our experts have highlighted customer engagement as a key differentiating factor for success among retailers.
Retailers today must have the ability to execute marketing campaigns, communication and loyalty programs efficiently and effectively to engage with a hyper connected, hyper informed and very impatient customer. To execute customer engagement successfully, retailers need to centralize and analyze customer data and purchasing history at mass scale and in short time.
A good Customer Relationship Management tool will identify prospects and opportunities for driving additional value for the customer and also the retailer by processing and analyzing customer behavior information and ultimately help retailers retain customers by recommending the most relevant offers. The main objective for the retailer is to better understand the customers, and to involve them in the relationship with the retailer at all stages of their interaction with one another by serving them better: with more relevant offers, timely information and help, but only when appropriate and useful.
Prospecting
Remember that attracting a new customer costs ten times more effort than keeping an existing customer.
Analysis
- Do we know the target customers accurately and efficiently?
- What are current trends?
- What are marketing campaigns that work?
These are all questions that need to be analyzed in detail to achieve good client engagement.
Networks
Engage social networks to work for retailers: What if satisfied customers talked about their experience to their friends? A retailer’s job at this stage will be to provide maximum satisfaction in customer experiences by encouraging and enabling the concept of ambassadors:
- To identify and reward the engagement of customers on social networks
- To identify and engage the entourage of these customers
Customer Relationship
Means the recording of customer data and their interactions with the brand, for example through
- their purchases,
- their returns,
- their interest in campaigns and promotions,
- their calls and the resolution of their problems
- their comments on social networks
All of this data must be recorded, sorted, and stored for analysis and insight.
Marketing
The management of offers and promotions, personalized or not, the creation of coupons, or simply advertising; can now be targeted smartly, if CRM data is correctly used.
A great novelty is to bring marketing teams into symbiosis with customer relation teams, for example sales teams, customer service teams or digital teams; ideally this is accompanied by a specialized tool that allows a 360° vision of the customer.
The tasks are then simplified and made more reliable by following best practice patterns. The creation of customer segments, through analysis of customer behavior, make it possible to precisely target groups of people for specific messages and campaigns.
Loyalty
Customers must feel engaged. This is mainly done through loyalty programs, with or without a card or other identifying mechanism, which is usually accompanied by rewards of different kinds.
Loyalty options are the “visible and official” part of customer loyalty. Point calculations, loyalty levels, discounts or associated gifts are tracked and appreciated over time.
There are other factors of loyalty:
The customer can also associate with a brand, in the long-term or for a particular event; this is the case when a couple chooses a brand to build their list of wedding gifts.
The customer will also have a feeling of loyalty when their experience is fully omni-channel enabled, allowing them to keep their wish list or shopping basket created on the internet when they enter a brick & mortar store.
Customer loyalty can also be rewarded by social media posts as a brand ambassador.
For each of these functionalities, Data is at the heart of analysis and decision support; a good tool should be powerful and stable and the data should be organized efficiently and the user interface should be easy to navigate, so that teams can easily access the right information at a glance for all channels of engagement.
How can a retailer best select the right tool and easily integrate it into business processes and the existing application environment?
To answer this question one option is the Oracle Retail Customer Engagement Cloud Solution.
Beyond the standard features offered by CRM tools, including visualization of customer records and purchase history; this solution draws our attention to key points:
The business features associated with:
- Marketing functionalities: offers and promotions, campaigns, coupon management are accessible through targeting by smart lists of customer segments, whether dynamic or static.
- Loyalty: via management of loyalty cards, gift cards, reward programs and management of wish lists
- Omni-channel customer journey: the tool makes it possible to coordinate all customer data regardless of channel (store, e-commerce, mobile) and to identify the trends.
- Analysis: of results by intelligent reporting tools that enable buyers to adapt their offer and further improve the company’s turnover.
We also want to highlight the ability to manage franchise operations which enables and manages access to customer information for franchisees based on their store or group of stores.
Other features simplify daily operations such as currency management, duplicate entry management, order and status management, role and privilege management.
Social media features are available to identify customer profiles and gather insights on social networks.
Technical and integration features available on cloud-based solution, along with other features such as the Web service approach, ergonomic configuration, and pre-integrated Oracle Commerce cloud suite for easy combination of payment tools (X-store), e-commerce (OCC), order management (OMS), BI (Retail Insight), make the cloud an ideal technology to deploy quickly with minimal effort and high reliability both for the users and the technical integration into the existing solution landscape.I
If you are interested in seeing or learning more about how a modern customer engagement can improve your retail business results, contact us for a presentation and demonstration of our approach here.