4 ways to create an experience-first future for customer loyalty

Are you looking for new ways to build trust, loyalty and repeat sales?

Creating delightful, personalised customer experiences is the third stage of your four-stage unified commerce journey. Here we look at how to invest in fresh, value-added experiences that appeal to today’s consumers.

To learn more about the first and second stages of unified commerce, check out our earlier blogs on how to get an accurate and single view of your inventory and extending your brand experience across all channels.

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Today’s retailers know that changing customer behaviours and disruptive technologies have altered the dynamics of customer loyalty.

While loyalty used to be closely linked to price and proximity, now it’s awarded to the brands that offer the best experiences and personalisation. Customers want individual content, communications, offers and rewards based on their preferences and purchase history. They expect to be recognised across all channels, no matter whether they walk into a store, phone a call centre or shop online.

Is customer experience important to decision making?

And when 73% of people say customer experience is an important factor in their purchasing decisions (just behind price and product quality), that’s a massive opportunity to create more authentic and frictionless experiences that strengthen your customer connections.

However, many retailers struggle to get this connection right.

There’s a growing disparity between rising consumer expectations and the reality of what they encounter online, on apps and in stores. Poor attempts at personalisation experience can turn consumers away, with a recent survey revealing that 38% of US digital shoppers would avoid shopping with retailers that made poor product recommendations.

And after Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal and heightened awareness of consumer rights via GDPR, data privacy and security are more important to consumers than ever. Retailers now face a ‘privacy paradox’ - they’re caught between the need to use data to provide better consumer experiences and the risk of violating consumer privacy.

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So how do you create meaningful relationships without overstepping boundaries?

1

Transactional rewards are out, experiences are in

As consumer spending shifts toward experiences rather than physical goods, customer loyalty programmes also have more success with experiential rewards. Discounts and cashback rewards yield below-average customer satisfaction, while personalisation and other experiential features make consumers happier.

Who’s doing it best?

Sephora’s Beauty Insider Program has over 10 million members and helped propel Sephora to the number one speciality beauty retailer in the world.

Why? It’s the experiences that the program offers at all levels. These include personalised product recommendations tailored to each customer based on shopping history, through to exclusive products and events, invitations to the Sephora Beauty Studio and early access to products and sales.

Not only do these offers motivate customers to purchase more products, they also make customers feel valued, foster loyalty and turn shoppers into brand advocates.

Here’s how you can do it:

Implement a fully integrated loyalty programme that gives you a 360 degree view of your customers. By looking at their purchase and browsing data, you can work out which types of experiences motivate them and develop timely, relevant and tailored rewards that surprise and delight. Be sure to offer personalised experiences across all your tiers, not just the top levels.

2

Immediacy counts

Customers want faster and cheaper purchase delivery to the location of their choice, including on-demand or same-day. This desire puts huge pressure on retailers to have a real-time view of inventory and the fulfilment capability to get orders turned around on a faster scale than ever before.

Who’s doing it best?

Multi-store bricks-and-mortar retailers that are taking advantage of their store networks to compete with Amazon and the online giants. While many eRetailers rush to build distribution centres, beef up their data analytics to anticipate orders and even test delivery by drone, bricks-and-mortar retailers already have the power to enable same-day delivery.

By turning their stores into customer-facing fulfilment centres that deliver purchases from stores to consumers in a few hours, they are creating a new retail battleground.

The savviest retailers are combining drop shipping with third-party logistics (also known as '3PL') to offer warehouse-to-door or even manufacturer-to-door. They no longer need to transport and store inventory in a costly warehouse and can efficiently and quickly scale by adding new suppliers and products that help win new customer business.

Here’s how you can do it:

With a unified commerce platform, you can choose the logistics and fulfilment options that are most efficient for your customers and most profitable for you.

Infinity’s order management system provides visibility across channels and ensures consistent and accurate stock, customer, purchase history and loyalty information in any channel. You can then offer same-day delivery by using APIs to partner with fast-shipping providers that let you connect to existing courier services and optimise delivery routes from your stores.

3

Create experience-first stores

Consumers no longer view bricks-and-mortar stores as primary shopping destinations but just one of many distribution points. That means to attract customers into your stores, you need to offer fresh, value-added experiences.

Who’s doing it best?

Target’s mobile app is a good example of how to combine mobile and in-store experiences. The app uses GPS to help in-store customers find what they’re looking for quickly. And beacon technology can alert shoppers to discounts as they move about.

Physical stores are evolving into showrooms that feature merchandise to be touched, felt and tried on, then ordered and shipped to shoppers' homes. Showrooms have always been popular with certain industries (such as bespoke clothing or furniture), but the format is taking off with online and bricks-and-mortar retailers as well.

Samsung’s ground-breaking flagship experiential store - Samsung 837 - goes even further. It’s a 56,000 square foot playground with interactive art, virtual reality, lounge areas, a recording studio and a three-story, 96-screen display wall. It doesn’t try to sell visitors anything - instead it encourages them to explore, learn and have fun. By focusing on activity, not product, the store has attracted accolades and been labelled one of the world’s top three brand experiences.

Here’s how you can do it:

By providing a single view of inventory and customer data, unified commerce gives you the freedom to design and implement new in-store customer service technologies and experiences. Imagine the customer satisfaction when you can offer shoppable screens, connected change rooms, or mobile apps that self-checkout. They all let customers easily locate products, find their order status or get personal recommendations.

4

Automate transactional interactions and solve customer problems

Retailers are using new technologies such as augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and RFID technology to not only automate parts of customer service to cut costs but also increase customer satisfaction.

By digitising services across all channels and touchpoints, they are increasing convenience, customisation and control over their customer experiences.

Who’s doing it best?

Many retailers start online, building websites that provide individual product recommendations based on a combination of the customer’s behaviour, CRM data and AI. They then create customer communications that include personalised recommendations, with emails released at a specific time when each individual is most likely to engage with the communication.

Sephora’s use of AI and VR spans online, in-store and app shopping. Knowing that the vast choice of products can be overwhelming for customers, Sephora developed a variety of tech options to make shopping more fun and more efficient.

Customers can try on makeup virtually using AR, match their skin tone to a foundation with AI and sample a fragrance via a touchscreen and scented air. And this is just the start, with Sephora saying that five or ten years from now every aspect of a customer’s experience, from what they see to the products that are recommended, will be customised, based on face shape, sales history and stated preferences.

Here’s how you can do it:

You can use APIs to easily create or add new apps, systems and services, fast. You can partner with startups and tech companies outside the retail industry to take advantage of new capabilities and deliver results at a speed and scale that would be unachievable within a traditional omnichannel model. You’ll also need to cultivate the necessary digital skills by partnering with or hiring talent from marketing, product development and technology industries to help source, develop, evaluate, test and ultimately launch new offerings and technologies for shopping in-store and online.

Now...

How will you create an ‘experience-first’ future?

Consumer expectations are driving today’s retail successes or failures.

The most successful retailers are digitising their entire business strategy, using new technologies to create in-store, in-app and online solutions that simplify and enhance the shopping experience.

Stay focused on your customers and their pain points. If what you're creating doesn't make the shopping experience faster, easier or more fun, then it's probably not worth the investment.

Keep an eye out for our blog about stage four of implementing a unified commerce platform - how to use APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to deliver truly innovative offerings to customers and build a competitive advantage.

If you’d like help to build genuinely meaningful customer experiences, get in touch. We’d love to help you achieve greater agility, faster growth and better margins.

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