Infographic – Shoppers share keys to astonishingly good customer delivery
Category: Blog
Merry shopping and prosperous retailing!
Christmas and New Year are just around the corner and shopping during this time of the year is at its peak. Amongst the festive shopping chaos, retailers and shoppers need to get their act right so that they do not miss out on anything – the maximum margins for retailers, and the right products for shoppers.
While shoppers – they are the ones who are connected – have the power of choice, the option of using multiple channels and alternatives through intense competition amongst brands. At this juncture, shoppers only know one thing, to get what they want, and they would not hesitate to switch between channels or for that matter even between brands, to do that. It is at this juncture that retail businesses can seize the opportunity to make their mark on the customers and step ahead of their competition.
Here’s how:
Connecting all the way – Gone are the days when the transaction marked the end of the sale and engagements were limited to product queries and purchases. Today, when customer expectations have reached new heights, better customer interaction is one of the necessities for retail owners to take cognizance of. They need to constantly engage with their customers, right from the product research stage till the next purchase, and it does not end there. Some benefits of connected retailing would be nurturing brand-customer relationships, enhancing customer loyalty, knowing the customers purchase history better and tailoring offerings to the customer’s tastes.
Choice is bliss – It should be the top prerogative of the retail businesses to add to the festive cheers by offering customers ample choices – be it products, prices, channels, promotions, and so on. Having said that, retailers should not overwhelm their customers with choices such that they are unable to make a decision. Rather, they should help their customers in choosing the right product that would be the best fit for the customers’ needs. Having the required quantity of merchandise and inventory, appropriate pricing of products, relevant and attractive promotions, and cross-channel operations are some of the necessary measures retailers need to take for providing a better and choicest shopping experience.
Creating the ho, ho, ho omni-channel experience – Retail businesses need to go omni-channel as it is the new norm and there are no two ways about it. If a customer would like to research for a product online, purchase the product in the store and expects it to be delivered at home, the retailer needs to manage the whole process seamlessly and satisfy the customer’s expectation. This would delight the customer since they are being offered a unified and seamless experience throughout their shopping journey regardless of the channel they choose to interact with. Investing in the right omni-channel retail solutions will allow retailers to spread the festive joy through superior customer experience and ring in more sales.
To make the Christmas shopping season truly merry, retail businesses need to be connected with their customers all the time, help them with the right choice, and provide them with a seamless omni-channel customer experience. This will help the retailers and their customers have a happy and prosperous New Year.
The Customer is King (but not dead). Long live the Customer (still not dead..)!
As the year draws to a close, aside from setting budgets and other plans, it’s typically a good time for some reflection. In our company, where we primarily bring enterprise level, solutions to mid-large retailers in the lifestyle segment, it’s been quite the year. Specifically, we have seen significant growth in interest in all things omni-channel. Conversations with prospects, customers, and partners around this are never the same, and hence always interesting. I thought it might be interesting to share an overview.
Fundamentally, most retailers understand there is this thing called E-commerce which is growing rapidly in South East Asia, with this growth generally seen as an opportunity, and typically I hear comments like “yes, we really should be doing something/more online”. However, the sense of concurrence on activity in the online retail world ends there. The number of options open to retailers is large and ever growing. As such, the possible strategies are almost endless. (Own site, marketplace, a mixture as a tasty starter?)
At this point I should clarify we are talking about retailers here, not marketplaces or any other pure-play E-commerce or M-commerce operations. Whilst they are the flavour of the month for many customers (huge range of choice, low prices, free delivery, interest-free credit terms – what could possibly go wrong?), they are not true retailers. Genuine retail requires a physical presence where real, live customers can touch and feel goods, and receive service from real, live sales associates. The differences in the 2 models appears easy to understand. And for many retailers, it would be preferable if they had the option of keeping to this traditional methodology. Creating and maintaining a presence online, whether it’s purely for branding purposes, or it’s a full blown electronic extension of the physical store, is costly and fraught with complexities and costs that often only surface once the process begins. Think ball of string + unravelling. And that’s only the beginning. Once content has been created and uploaded, there remains the often-under-estimated process of making sure the Customer gets what he/she wants, how and when he/she wants.
So as a first step, many, quite understandably, adopt basic models; we simply show what inventory is sitting in a specified area of the main warehouse, and fulfil from there. E-commerce box ticked. Minimal revenues, minimal costs, and minimal disruption of the ongoing business. Done. Now let’s focus on more important issues such as clearing a slow-moving line or re-distributing that stock, currently sitting in Malang, to Bali, to complete broken size ranges or fulfil a regional preference in terms of size/colour. Now if we can find an app for that, perhaps we can take this online/digital thing a bit more seriously…
The solution is, of course, not an app. It is simply making the customer the centre of attention. Just like they were when they stepped into a dry goods store back in the Old (Wild) West. Mr. Shopkeeper knew all his customers not only by name, but by preference. Over the years, as businesses grow and attention spans shorten (kudos if you got this far by the way), that customer intimacy has shrunk. Convenience has risen yes, but gone is the attention most human beings either crave, or at the least, appreciate. So how to bring back the Old West service then, in an age of smart-phones and Alibaba?
The answer is omni-channel. Simply defined as a merging of the offline and online retail worlds, it allows us to start paying better attention to our customer, delighting them more often, and creating a better business at the same time.
This win-win may sound too good to be true but it’s based on some simple business rules – give your customer what they want, where they want it, when they want it, at a price they like, and you are half way home. The challenge is executing these promises across multi-channels, whilst keeping the whole experience simple from the customer perspective. Arming your team with enterprise-class solutions which take care of inventory, fulfilment, and loyalty regardless of the touch-point is a basic. Empowering your sales associates to cross and up-sell, and never lose a sale due to “out of stock” is extremely valuable. As is developing loyalty strategies which improve margins, not erode them. And rather crucially, is to start looking at your business as a whole, not as online versus offline. Because the customer lives in both worlds, at the same time. And he/she is definitely very much alive…
This article has been written by:
Stephen Dodgson, Principal Management Consultant, ETP Group
Originally from Yorkshire, England, Stephen has spent around 30 years working in various markets including Asia, Europe and Africa, across several sectors: fashion, media and enterprise level IT solutions. He currently consults to many of the finest retailer brands in South East Asia, providing enterprise level, omni-channel ready solutions.
Founded in 1988, ETP is an Omni channel Retail Solutions company headquartered in Singapore, serving market leaders in more than 22 countries across Asia Pacific, India and the Middle East. ETP’s Omni-channel Solutions include Omni channel POS, Mobility, CRM, Marketing and Promotion Campaigns, Order Management & Supply Chain Management, and Merchandise & Assortment Planning.
How to make discounting work!
The festive season is synonymous with shopping and sales. Year after year, the festive shopping season gets more demanding, basically due to two main factors – increase in the number of shoppers and rise in the competition amongst retail businesses. While more shoppers is certainly good news to the business, tough competition can be detrimental to success in the festive shopping arena.
One of the most common and probably one of the most effective techniques used by retail businesses to attract shoppers is offering festive discounts. Discount based promotions are a popular crowd puller but in the modern day retail, planning and executing discounts the right way can be a huge challenge. Retailers need to make sure that customers are finding their offers better than the others. At the same time, they also need to ensure that they are not gouging a hole in their own pockets while offering markdowns or free of charge products.
Here are some simple tips that retail businesses can use to make discounting work:
Defining objectives: This is an important step that retailers need to take while thinking about discounts. They need to clearly define the purpose of running a sale or a promotion and ensure that it is aligned with the overall business objective. The purpose could be varied, such as, looking for new customers, encouraging repeat purchases, selling off old stock and so on. Based on the purpose, retailers can decide what kind of offers they need to plan and execute, when to run the promotion campaigns offering the discounts and which products should they be offering discounts on. Further, the performance of the promotion can be tracked and measured effectively when the purpose is clear.
Segment right: Once the purpose is defined, next is to identify the target audience to whom the discounts would be offered. This includes segmenting shoppers in to different buckets so that more relevant and attractive discounts can be offered to each. Shoppers can be segmented based on their purchase history, their buying preferences, their budgets, demographics and more. Shoppers would be more eager to receive offers that are most appealing to them.
Mindful of margins: Retail business owners need to be mindful of their margins while running offers and discounts. Based on the objectives and customer segments, they need to set an acceptable margin so that they don’t end up giving away too much and running into losses.
Creatively strategize: Once retailers have their objectives defined, they know which customer segments need to be targeted and they have set their acceptable range of margin, they should then draw up strategies and define the business rules for running the promotions. While doing so, retail owners should get creative through techniques such as clever pricing, highlighting new products, offering different discounts for varied set of customers.
Execute and monitor: Next, it is time to get your promotions engine running and track its performance against set KPIs that have been predefined keeping in mind the objectives, margin, customer segments and plans. Constantly and proactively tracking and tweaking the promotion campaigns for improving performance is necessary to reap maximum benefits from discounts.
Offering discounts is a tested and proven technique for retailers to make the most of the shopping season, but it is important that it is done right.
How CRM helps retailers reduce risks and strategize business/product development accurately!
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) may be perceived as an enhanced customer retention and loyalty strategy. Modern day CRM systems can help retailers achieve much beyond that. Using an efficient CRM system, retailers can now strategize the demand increment while optimally planning the supply or resources required at every process stage. The key methods here are:
CRM KPIs: Retailers can deem a retail operation successful on the basis of profitability (short-term or long-term). Through CRM, retailers can redefine the rationale behind his retail activities and ascertain how they should affect the end consumer. This entails defining the purpose of the activity and attributing the right resources to the right opportunities by studying the past, present and future business positioning. Armed with this knowledge, retailers can better understand the viability of his CRM definitions with respect to the market dynamism.
Customer Segmentation: This refers to the segmentation basis the demographical/geographical and physiographical/behavioral parameters pertaining to the customers. The former presents the ‘visible’ characteristics which can be derived through registrations; while the latter constitutes characteristics which can be derived through deeper analysis. This helps retailers administer the right amount of engagement through the right channels and even define the business rules which allow different customers to be treated differently.
RFM Analysis: Although this forms a part of the customer segmentation process, the exceptional value derived through this analysis validates its special mention. RFM stands for Recency, Frequency, Monetary Analysis; Recency denotes how long ago the customer last made a purchase, Frequency specifies how many purchases the customer has made (within a specified time period), Monetary is total monies spent by the customer (within a specified time period). This analysis helps retailers to optimize their marketing and promotion spending, ensuring accurate targeting of key customers, basis the activity strategy.
Good customer relationships are the result of ‘the right product, for the right customer, in the right place, at the right time, in the right quantity, in the right condition, and at the right cost’. CRM is a way to identify each of these ‘rights’ and to segment customers accordingly.
Trends retailers need to invest in
Evolution is key to sustainability and every business needs to evolve in order to survive for years together. Retail businesses also need to adapt to their fast paced, dynamic, highly competitive and challenging environment to be able to progress in today’s day and age. This can certainly seem like climbing a huge mountain. Hence, to be able to achieve this feat, below are a few trends that retailers can invest in now, before it is too late for them.
Omni-channel is the way to go: If a retail business is still banking on one or a few channels to stake its claim to the market share, well, it is time to realize that such a strategy won’t work in the long run and sooner or later, the business would be biting the dust. Omni-channel retailing is the way to go forward and any retailer who is not adopting an omni-channel strategy should invest in it right away, else the business’s survival will be jeopardized.
Same day delivery or it is a ‘no-sale’: Gone are the days when retailers could take weeks and months to deliver products to their customers. With the intense competition in the e-Commerce market, everyone is trying to be better than the others. One of the latest features big giants have started providing to their benefit is ‘same-day delivery’ to their customers for the products purchased. Fulfilling this kind of a commitment requires a pre-planned yet flexible and comprehensive supply chain management. Retailers need to invest in it or else face no sale situations.
Customer expectations is not the limit: If the focus is not the customer, the retail business is sure to perish. Customer experience today is an extremely competitive battle ground. In order to stay in business, retailers, however big or small, need to ensure that they are leaving no stone unturned in providing their customers with an experience that would drive them to come back. Retail business owners have to ensure they invest in the right resources so that they do not limit their offerings to merely fulfilling the customer expectations, but aim to exceeding them.
Mobile is the destination: Retail businesses need to be where their customers are and one of the most favorable destinations where retailers can engage with their cusomers is on mobile devices. Smartphones and tablets are the new norm for the consumers today. If retailers need to keep up with this norm, they have to invest in the right mobile technology. This will enable them to be where their customers are and not fade away because of obsolescence.
If retail businesses want to make a lasting impact on their customers, they have to be armed with the right resources – people, products, processes, technologies and so on. Retailers must get ready to invest in the right trends at the right time as this will help their businesses to evolve and keep-up with the quick, ever changing needs of the retail industry.
How to manage customers that are difficult
With the holiday season less than a month away, shoppers are already planning their purchases in terms of products, budget and time. As soon as the holiday shopping season kicks off, retailers can expect an overwhelming rush. While this could be a good time for retailers to target more sales and boost profits, there could be other aspects that could put retailers in a spot of bother.
One of the effects of the holiday shopping rush is that customers are more demanding, have less time and attention span, and are not willing to compromise. In other words, they may become very difficult to handle and retailers could have a tough time managing them.
In order to help retailers negotiate such occurrences of dealing with not-so-pleasant holiday shopping experiences, here are some simple tips that could prove to be effective:
Listen: Shoppers who are upset need to be heard. So allow your customers to speak their heart out about anything that is unpleasant to them. Active listening would allow retailers to consciously assimilate and comprehend the issues their customers are facing, rather than being judgmental towards them. Active listening will be reflected in the retailers approach towards understanding the customers and this would leave a positive impression on the customers. They will feel that they are being given a fair importance and thus instill a sense of trust in the retail business resolving their issues.
Act: Once the customers have vented out their problems to the retailers, it is now up to the retailers to act. They need to take the necessary measures to resolve the customers’ issues. Retailers need to come up with a solution that would be feasible for both, their customers and themselves. If the retail business is unable to resolve the problem upfront, they should request for an appropriate time and respond within the stipulated time.
Repeat: There will be multiple instances where retailers will come across customers that are very difficult to handle and manage. The two steps mentioned above thus need to be employed time and again by retail businesses to reduce the chances of lost sales and the number of disgruntled customers they would need to deal with.
Fore planning, resilience, the right mind-set and treating every customer as an important asset for their business could enable retailers to effectively listen to their customers and act appropriately, making them the preferred retailer that customers go to for a happy shopping experience.
Stay tuned to know the 10 tips that could add extra bling to the festive season sales and profits.
3 P’s for Effective Retailing
Retail as a business, is highly complicated as there are numerous aspects and operations involved in its successful and smooth functioning. Right from stocking a product in the store to the customer checking out of the store with that product, the entire flow can be broken down into intermediate activities that need to be managed carefully for the overall business to be complete. Now, with the influence of advanced technology, the scope of retail has further expanded to incorporate a host of other concepts and functions, thus complicating the whole process. But from the olden days till date, to run a retail business effectively, no matter how complicated it is, there are 3 basic and important aspects that need to be taken care of:
People – Retail is all about people. The retailer or the business owner along with the other employees including the store staff and most importantly, the buying customer are all important for retail. Even in the case of online retailing or e-tailing, there are people working in the background for the business to run efficiently, as well as to ensure that orders are fulfilled right up to the customer’s doorstep. The need of the hour for retail businesses to survive is to become ‘customer-centric’, and customers needless to say again, are people. The importance of people cannot be stressed any further and the right people management, be it customers or employees, would definitely go a long way in making the business better.
Product – The core objective of retail is to ensure that customers can procure/avail the products/services they desire, when they need them. In simple words, retailing is where demand for a certain product is successfully fulfilled by the retail channels. As such, the ‘product’ is a necessary entity for the business to take place. Retailers need to be aware of the products that customers are looking for and have them readily available and at reasonable costs. Having the right product at the right place at the right time in the right quantity and at the right price is key for running a successful retail business.
Process – A business is set of processes that should be carried out effectively to achieve the objectives of the business. In retail, there are a host of processes that need to be undertaken and managed for the proper functioning of the business. The right systems in place along with pre-defined rules to guide each and every process, and timely monitoring to assess the performance of each function is highly essential for any retail business to not only sustain, but also to garner profit and grow.
The right people with the right products and the right processes, and effective management of the three will help business owners to get it right in retail.
360-degree view of the customer in omni-channel retail
Customers may use various retail touch points to purchase products and to contact a company for service and support. Companies can get a complete view of their customers by aggregating data from such touch points to acquire a 360-degree view of the customer.
Technologies such as mobile devices, online communities, social media platforms, and more, has resulted in a boom in the number of touch points for customer interaction. Without the right tools, this can pose a serious challenge in aggregating the data from the many diverse interactions that the customers may have across channels.
Nowadays, retail businesses can employ an increasing assortment of tools to obtain a 360-degree customer view to gather customer information – social media listening tools to listen to what customers are saying on various social media sites, predictive analytics tools to determine what customers may research or purchase next, customer relationship management suites to track the customers’ buying history and to reward them, and marketing automation software to offer a seamless, unified omni-channel shopping experience to the customers. Such software should have the ability and the interface to integrate with other applications to enable data sharing and attain a cohesive, up-to-date, accurate Single View of Customers in the real-time.
The 360-degree view of customers also often requires a big data analytics strategy to marry structured data, or data that can reside in the rows and columns of a database, with unstructured data as it resides on social media platforms and so forth is becoming increasingly important.
Also Read: Retail And The Importance Of Integration
10 Things to look for while replacing your legacy retail systems
Today’s retail consumer is smarter, tech-savvier, and extremely demanding than ever. Not only is she shopping across online and offline channels, but they also expect to have a unified, splendid experience as they switch between channels. They expect retailers to offer the choicest deals on the finest products at the best prices and to fulfill orders in the speediest and the most affordable manner possible. Phew! Those are some very high, almost back-breaking expectations that most retailers cannot meet using their legacy retail systems.
To fulfill the stringent demands of modern consumers, retailers need to equip their businesses with a new-age, robust retail solution that is scalable and dynamic enough to manage customers, inventory as well as valuable business data across multiple stores and touchpoints. It may seem like a difficult task at first; but with the right retail solutions replacing their conventional legacy systems, retailers can cakewalk themselves through this.
Also, it is something retailers will need to achieve if they wish to stay in business. Retailers need to bear in mind the following 10 things while replacing their legacy retail systems:
1. Start with the customer
Focus on who you are overhauling your retail management system for – the customer. Discern their expectations from an ideal shopping experience; and then choose a system with features that can help deliver that experience.
2. Solution mapping for business
Define the project/business objectives clearly. Map the deliverables of the new solution with the business needs and goals set. This will help in setting priorities right to successfully find and deploy the right solution for your business.
3. Make it a gradual process
Break down the process into batches if the prospect of launching a new retail management system across the entire operation seems overwhelming. For instance, rolling out the new system to a few stores before moving on to other locations allows the enterprise to ease into the new solution and keeps the project from becoming overwhelming.
4. Be wary of probable drawbacks
Before signing up for a shiny new system, think about how to transition users to the new solution. Is it easy to understand or would it be necessary to invest resources in training? Is it customizable? Would it be necessary to modify existing workflows? Can the new system integrate with other solutions that the business is already using? These are just some of the questions you should answer before deciding on a new system.
5. Get organized
Replacing the legacy retail management system needs a process that is best fit for your business. Set up a procedure that can keep the implementation on track.
6. Bring in the specialist
Have in-house experts research, evaluate, and deploy a new retail management system, or consult with third party experts who can assist in all phases of the project. Tap into their technical knowledge and expertise to make smarter decisions throughout the process.
7. Choose a system with robust inventory capabilities
Inventory is the building block of any retail business. It is also one of the most challenging aspects to manage at company-wide stock levels. The vast majority of multi-store retailers specifically look for cross-channel inventory management capabilities in their new POS to streamline inventory management.
8. Embrace new technology with open arms
Try to find the most forward looking innovations in retail technology that are right for the business.
9. List the “must haves”
Create a “must have” list of features and capabilities that are absolutely needed versus the “nice to haves,” to avoid ending up with a beast of a project.
10. Test, test, test
Thoroughly test the retail management system to ensure that it works right for your business.
How long should the process take? Wood advises retailers to allocate six weeks to for the search as “this is the average length of time companies are able to find a replacement software in.”
http://www.capterra.com/point-of-sale-software/user-research
