How to Power a Great Retail

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

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The omnichannel dilemma

Brands engaging customers and prospects with traditional marketing strategies alone are missing huge opportunities to meet customers exactly where they are in the buying process, or what we call the “customer journey.”

According to research by Google,1 a typical customer journey is made up of fragments of intent-driven “micro-moments.” These micro-moments occur instantaneously, up to hundreds of times a day — most often on a mobile device. In fact, ComScore found that 65 percent of all digital media time is now spent on mobile app usage, and smartphone usage overall increased 98 percent from 2016.2 This means that your customers primarily use a mobile device to access the internet, and when using the internet, they use mobile applications 65 percent of the time. In fact, 85 percent of customers would prefer to use a mobile app over a mobile-optimized website.3

To add more fuel to the omnichannel fire, customers aren’t only increasing mobile device usage, but 90 percent of them are using retail mobile apps while inside

1 https://think.storage.googleapis.com/docs/micromoments-guide-to-winning-shift-to-mobile-download.pdf

2 http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Presentations-and-Whitepapers/2016/2016-US-Cross-Platform-Future-in-Focus

3 http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/app-marketing/7-must-features-ecommerce-mobile-app/

3cloud@appirio.com 888.680.7227 www.appirio.com

a physical retail location.4 This means a retailer’s website, brick-and-mortar location, and mobile app must display synonymous branding and design while also providing consumer-grade, intuitive shopping experiences that are seamless for the buyer across a wide array of digital platforms. How can retail marketers focus efforts with such expansive buying preferences? Customers want the easiest and most pleasant purchasing experience, and as digital technology advances, it becomes a fundamental demand for retailers to meet.

Many brands (understandably) want to create the slickest, most creative marketing campaigns, and frequently spend lots of time and money on the best and most impressive ways to reach customers. But according to Google’s Micro-Moments research,5 the least sexy stuff is often the most important — like getting new products in the hands of video bloggers, or making sure the brand ranks high in relevant searches.

4 http://marketingland.com/survey-90-percent-of-retail-shoppers-use-smartphones-in-stores-135759

5 https://think.storage.googleapis.com/docs/micromoments-guide-to-winning-shift-to-mobile-download.pdf

Some of the major trends surfacing as critical areas to master in retail shouldn’t come as a surprise. In fact, retailers and marketers have struggled to apply these trends successfully since we first heard about them in the early-2000s. Today, retailers must adopt an omnichannel presence, which includes stellar mobile capabilities and analytical use of data and technology to personalize marketing efforts for every type of consumer, all simultaneously, and under budget!

The only caveat? Brands must implement and master all of the critical areas at the same time to create a high quality Customer Experience throughout the entire buying process. Change can be scary for a business looking to scale and reduce overhead costs while also striving for the best Customer Experience. Retailers have tried for years to create an omnichannel experience, but frequently fail because they miss a few critical pieces consumers demand.

We’ll discuss how to identify meaningful individual customer insights, expand mobile, and use cloud technology to personalize and strengthen employee touch points to consumers.

As technology advances in the cloud, there are a few ways retailers can finally jump into the omnichannel pool and succeed — without blowing the budget or spending years implementing and training employees.

85 percent of customers would prefer to use a mobile app over a mobile-optimized website.

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Identify your customer journey

The first step to addressing your customers’ needs is to lay them out, like a chart. If you haven’t created a customer journey map (a diagram that illustrates the steps customers go through when engaging with your company), start there.

A buyer may see a social media ad that directs them to the retailer’s mobile app or website to do more research on the product line. As interest grows, the consumer drives to the store, talks with a few sales associates about the product online, and then looks for the product to feel and play around with before purchasing. Then, while standing next to the product in-store, the buyer researches online reviews in the retailer’s mobile app and online. Finally, they purchase the product, and since the store didn’t have the color the buyer wanted, the sales associate quickly finds the product at another retail location and has it delivered to the original store.

Omnichannel interactions include online experiences, in-store experiences, marketing collateral, and/or experiences with your products or services. Mapping out the journey that the buyer had before making the purchase empowers your Customer Experience team to cater processes and systems to better serve them in a targeted way.

5cloud@appirio.com 888.680.7227 www.appirio.com

The popularity and use of mobile payments will grow as they are more widely used by customers and accepted by retailers.

6cloud@appirio.com 888.680.7227 www.appirio.com

Identifying the “micro-moments” when customers engage with your brand can be challenging, but with tools like Google Trends, Google Consumer Surveys, and YouTube Trends, you can discover what your customers are looking for and the types of content they’re consuming. It’s also important to listen to customer feedback and create buyer personas that paint a more detailed picture of who those individuals are and what’s important to them.

Once you have a foundation for what your target customer looks like, it’s time to streamline the tools and processes you’re using to reach them. In order to master omnichannel retailing, mobile deployments and consumer personalization are leading the roster.

Data and technology empower fast retail adoption

As a result of the omnichannel dilemma, there is a rush for retailers to adopt more digital tools, and we only see this trend growing year-over-year. We’ve talked about how Google has a plethora of tools like Google Trends, Surveys, and others. The first tool, both free and widely-used, Google Analytics, provides incredibly insightful customer behaviors if marketers are willing to dig deep enough to find them.

For example, a retailer can use Google Analytics pixel logs to see that a female shopper bought five dresses within a 15 minute time frame, spending more than $7,000. Then, while browsing shoes and purses, no additional purchases were made. It’s a common assumption she’ll send at least 4 dresses back because the retailer offers free shipping, so accessories don’t come into play until she picks the dress! Aggregate data won’t reveal vital customer decisions like this one, so it is pertinent for retailers and data analysts to scrutinize the customer journey with all of the cloud tools available to them.

In-store tools at The North Face allow retail sales associates to learn more about a customer and gather crucial details, not only about the customer’s buying preferences, but social media activities as well.6 The retailer’s electronic personal shopper collects preferential purchasing data, social media accounts, and shipping information for customers each time they use it. From there, retail associates can analyze the data to cater that specific customer’s experience with marketing collateral, social media ads, and more.

Entire brand messaging, marketing campaigns, buying deliberations, and many other major business decisions can be made from this collected data. Retailers that adopt these cloud technologies make omnichannel success easier to obtain.

6 http://www.cmo.com.au/article/605113/7-ways-north-face-using-data-make-market-ing-more-relevant/

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Alternatively, data collected from consumers’ buying preferences and social media activities can also be used to optimize website performance. Insights from customer engagement and purchases can be used to create more efficient site searches, homepage layouts, and even new landing pages.

These digital tools are also crucial for the in-store Customer Experience, including things like shopper apps, digital signage, and kiosks. Even having the ability to accept payments with mobile systems like Apple Pay and Google Wallet enhance the experience for consumers. It can also speed up the process and efficiency of a transaction.

Master mobile shopping and online checkouts

In commerce, a “mobile-first” mentality is a must-have for any retailer, as more consumers are using mobile devices to research brands, share product information, and ultimately: to shop. Forrester predicts that the “mobile internet” will soon become meaningless, and consumers will stop considering internet access on their mobile device as a scaled-down version of the “real” internet.7 Even when people are at home with access to alternative devices like laptops, mobile devices will still be their go-to technology.

7 https://appirio.com/cloud-powered-blog/the-rise-of-mobile-payments-and-what-you-need-to-know

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Forrester predicts that this year, mobile and tablet commerce will reach $142 billion in the US, and represent 38 percent of all online transactions. They also cite that more than 30 percent of sales will occur on mobile. In other words, those customers will use a mobile device at some point in the customer journey, be it during product research, in-store interactions, or in place of a plastic credit card. That’s $142 billion in the United States alone!8

Online retailers must be mindful when it comes to creating an experience that leads smartphone customers to also complete their purchase on that mobile device. If they don’t feel comfortable completing the transaction right then and there (and want to wait and do it on the “real internet”), they are less likely to ever complete the purchase.

Retailers should also consider the role mobile payments play in the Customer Experience. The idea behind mobile payments is that people will no longer need to carry credit cards; just one more thing our mobile devices eliminate the need for — along with calculators, paper maps, and notepads. But like credit cards before it, the popularity and use of mobile payments will grow as they are more widely used by customers and accepted by retailers. Remember when people wrote checks at the grocery store? Much like it took time for credit and debit cards to

8 https://www.forrester.com/report/Forrester+Data+Mobile+And+Tablet+Commerce+-Forecast+2016+To+2021+EU7/-/E-RES135915

9cloud@appirio.com 888.680.7227 www.appirio.com

catch on as a method of paying for everyday items, mobile payment is still a new concept for many. But paying with your phone will inevitably become as routine as swiping a card or handing a cashier a $20 bill.

That said, it’s the companies willing to shake the legacy, on-premises systems that will survive and ultimately thrive. It takes realization from decision makers that new tools are now readily available, budget-friendly, and fairly easy to adopt. These tools provide critical resources to enable optimization of the Customer Experience wherever your customers shop. Customers now ask: who provides the best experience and where is the purchase made easiest? By optimizing both the offline and online experience, you’ll successfully beat competitors and provide customers with two equally attractive methods of buying.

Learn deep insights of customer behaviors

With the rise of mobile and personalization, consumers have grown to demand an experience that is tailor-made for them, making them feel like more than just a number in the buying process. In fact, 86 percent of patrons say that personalization plays a part in their buying process and impacts their future purchasing decisions.9 That means

9 https://www.infosys.com/newsroom/press-releases/Documents/genome-re-search-report.pdf

that if the online experience isn’t catered to the individual, chances are that they won’t complete the transaction or become a returning customer. So it’s imperative that retailers use personalized marketing and consumer data to capture those customers.

It is now crucial for retail brands to acquire digital tools and technology and collect customers’ online habits and data to properly personalize the shopping experience. Still, more than half of retailers struggle with learning and using customer data for personalization within the shopping experience.10 The positive news is that customers are more willing than ever to give their personal information to a business if it means that it will expedite and enhance the shopping process. Right now is the perfect time for retailers to start diving into customer data; it can mean big wins for consumer retention, loyalty, and revenue.

Once the chosen tool collects the data, the same data-collecting technology can help implement crucial customer information into the marketing plan for personalization. Particularly, email marketing should be hyper-focused and on-par with customers’ preferences, interests, and purchases. This can include product recommendations, special offers, important dates of the consumer, content, and product grid rankings on category, and more.

10 http://marketingland.com/consumers-want-personalization-but-retail-ers-just-cant-seem-to-deliver

10cloud@appirio.com 888.680.7227 www.appirio.com

Right now is the perfect time for retailers to start diving into customer data; it can mean big wins for consumer retention, loyalty, and revenue.

11cloud@appirio.com 888.680.7227 www.appirio.com

What a digital transformation looks like

One of the best examples of customer personalization comes from Amazon’s first 2014 release of the Amazon Echo. What first began as a personal assistant who could make to-do lists, play music, order products from Amazon.com, and give favored sports updates now incorporates technology enabling Echo owners to teach and train the device to do almost anything.11

Consumers who demand real-time, niche results can find almost anything they need using ultra-personal algorithms Amazon developed for its retail platform, with only a sentence of speech as Alexa learns more about

11 http://www.pcworld.com/article/3045271/amazon-echo-can-be-customized-for-spe-cific-commands-devices-with-this-free-tool.html

their shopping habits, choices, and activity online. And that isn’t all. Adobe announced in September 2016 it would be adding additional personalization features to Alexa for retail purposes. For example, an Echo could be placed in a hotel room that recognizes customers, preventing the need for logins or hotel loyalty account management. Alexa could provide recommendations for the customer to spend loyalty points on a live event or dinner at a 5-star restaurant. Now that is convenience!

Technology enables Alexa to learn shopping habits, choices, and online activity – but this is just the beginning.

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Most Nike stores are a vibrant marvel of color and products are displayed so customers see Nike as a premier activewear brand that provides the proper technology for accomplishing the greatest feats.12 It makes the consumer feel good about the brand before a purchase is ever made. This aesthetic is carried over to the website and the mobile app, featuring “Pinterest-like” materials and wood architecture for a complete omnichannel Customer Experience.

At its Innovation for EveryBody event in March 2017, Nike went one step further to delight customers by revamping the popular Nike+ app, which will consolidate retail, fitness, and customer support processes in one place.13 As a result, users will see targeted content in a “newsfeed” of products, tips, and announcements wrapped up with a digital storefront of custom product recommendations tailored directly to them. Finally, the mobile app will empower users to schedule consultations in a Nike store, eliminating the separation between employee associates, support providers, and personal coaches.

12 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nike-case-study-what-omnichannel-retail-should-look-like-alex-senn

13 https://www.psfk.com/2016/03/personalization-leads-nikes-retail-game-plan-2016-innovation-for-everybody.html

Nike revamps Nike+ app to consolidate retail, fitness, and customer support.

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A natural foods farmers’ market grocer located in Arizona, Sprouts was looking for a way to live up to its brand promise from the c-suite to the storefront. Unfortunately, while the fresh foods and great prices met the mark, the customer service experience left much to be desired. In fact, the customer support team for more than 300 cases per week across 150 stores in eight states fell on the shoulders of three people and archaic spreadsheets.

When Sprouts decided to jump to the cloud, Salesforce Service Cloud was a natural fit. It enabled the group to track complaints easily from every location in a matter of minutes. As a first foray into the cloud, Sprouts leveraged Web-to-Case to gather customer support requests from its website, generating new case tickets in Salesforce. Customers could log complaints via a webform, emails, and calls, and all the data was easily entered and tracked through a refined support process. Using basic case reporting by open date, status, and resolution time, customer service was more effective and impactful.

The best part of Sprouts’ decision to move to the cloud, and a benefit available to any organization who adopts a cloud system, was scalability. In addition to increased customer support process visibility, teams can more accurately leverage expertise to resolve complaints quickly, respond faster, and track data and demographics within the customer base. As customer satisfaction increases and revenue grows, businesses are empowered to make moves that impact growth decisions for the entire organization.

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The answer is in the cloud

Retailers can tie current trends together easily and efficiently with data and tools for the best possible Customer Experience. It’s essential to move to an omnichannel model to scale, grow, and adapt to consumer needs. While there may still be some obstacles to adopting omnichannel, as the examples from Amazon, Nike, and Sprouts prove, there are ways to overcome these barriers.

Gone are the days when an omnichannel presence for retailers was unattainable because of incredible technology and overhead costs. Cloud experts — like those at Appirio — offer end-to-end expertise to help retailers implement the best set of solutions for their customers and workers. Retailers that successfully undergo this type of digital transformation will inevitably increase customer retention and loyalty, revenue and ROI, and longevity.

Interested in learning more about Appirio’s retail solutions? Contact us today.

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