Calling All Retail Bods: How CRM Can Accelerate Your Growth

Personalisation and customised experiences are one of the key ways retailers can differentiate themselves. This could be anything from recording previous orders and recommending products to providing in-store apps that show customers where their favourite brands are.

Throughout a customer’s journey with you, they leave nuggets of information about themselves and their purchase decisions. When recorded and analysed properly, these nuggets can be used to offer tailored experiences that build brand loyalty and create more sales.

The first step to giving your customers a personalised experience is getting your data ducks in a row. Integrated toolsets through single providers like Salesforce allow you to create a rich data bank that can seamlessly connect with your sales and communication channels to form rich personalised experiences for your customers.

As our co-founder, Chee Ho Wan puts it: “What we are seeing in retail right now is a trend towards tools that automate a lot of the leg work to providing personalisation. This makes perfect sense, as it is very difficult to build these tools in-house”.

For example, some retailers are creating so-called “smart stores” to help them understand user behaviour and ensure traffic in-store can be managed more efficiently. There has also been a huge increase in the implementation of loyalty card scanning at checkouts. For customers, this means collecting loyalty points and/or claiming discounts on their shop. For retailers, it allows them to collect data around a customer’s purchasing history and store it alongside the demographic data assigned to their loyalty card. From this, they can create personalised offers on products they purchase often and send communications around new and existing products that the customer is most likely to be interested in. To make this happen, retailers must be able to seamlessly connect their customer information, purchase history, sales data and automated communications. Salesforce can do exactly this.

“We are at the start of a new era with in-store shopping, where the level of personalisation you can already get on Instagram will be transported to bricks and mortar locations.” says Steven Paul, Trigg Digital co-founder. “What if your phone could recommend products that you might like as you walk into a retail space? The opportunity here is significant.”

Marketplaces are also expanding their horizons. Luxury marketplace Farfetch has recently diversified its proposition, partnering with brands under its B2B arm, Black & White, to improve the back-end technology that keeps customers coming back to its outlets. It’s a bold step, but one that may well pay off.

If you want to keep up, your data stack must be able to adapt to changing requirements more quickly than it did even as recently as five years ago. A quality, integrated CRM solution can help you do just that.

Jessica Ho, Trigg’s retail leader, said: “We are working with retailers to develop new revenue channels like subscription models. These models have different requirements to traditional ones, so we have designed accelerators that can get companies moving quickly with their new revenue streams”.

The most common issue we find when analysing the level of harmony across teams in a retail business is a misalignment between the brand’s service solution and e-commerce platform. This typically means that the service solution does not have the complete history of the customer, causing sales and marketing teams to make the wrong decisions (and take far too long making them). This quickly feeds into a customer’s fear of their order being lost, or their customer service complaints taking too long to resolve, making that particular retailer less than favourable the next time they shop.

With a solid, unified CRM programme, your customer’s data is always accessible. For retailers, this means no long waits for customer service responses, no lost orders and no unhappy customers!

On the face of it, it probably doesn’t make much sense to think that data analysis can help with sustainability. But, surprisingly, it’s one of the strongest tools you can use toward achieving zero carbon status.

A key starting point is a sustainability gap analysis. Whether it’s making sure that your staff are travelling in the greenest way, offsetting carbon emissions, recycling office equipment or doing an entire carbon footprint audit, bringing all the data into one system enables your company to establish a baseline for future performance. Creating sustainability metrics allow you to analyse your business and scrutinise your supply chain, identifying the areas most in need of change (and changing them).