Monthly Archives: March 2018

4 Ways to Push your Hypermarket Business to Higher Profits

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The hypermarket industry is in a state of flux, much like most other consumer-facing industries today. With the rise in adoption of digital and mobile technologies, consumers are getting used to seamless and connected cross-channel experiences provided by innovative brands who are making the most of these technologies. Consumers now live in an EasyVerse™ and expect such easy experiences everywhere.

 

Many retailers today, are ill-equipped to meet the needs of the ‘always on’ digital consumer. According to a Nielsen survey, only 7% of grocery retailers rated themselves as having the skill sets to succeed in digital. Not rising up to consumer experience demands and a lack of presence across channels may hurt hypermarkets in the long term, especially considering the low profit margins the industry in known for.

 

How then can you increase hypermarket revenue for long term, and maximise the potential your business has? It’s all about doing a few things, but doing them really well while ensuring what you’re doing is really well known among your consumers.

 

Let’s look at four areas for hypermarket growth strategies where you can to focus to help push your hypermarket business towards hyper growth.

 

Be Available, Across Channels

 

While it’s established that having an online presence is important, just having an ecommerce website is not going to cut it anymore. You can’t go about this with a “build it and they will come” approach. Tech forward consumers can quickly find out if an application or service is adding any value to them. While you develop digital initiatives, you need to consider if you’re creating value and clearly communicating this value to your consumers.

 

Creating a connected and seamless omnichannel shopping experience is a strategic priority for many grocery retailers in 2018.

 

Therefore, it is a must for hypermarket businesses to leverage their physical and digital assets to optimize the consumer experience they’re providing. Creating a connected and seamless omnichannel shopping experience is a strategic priority for many grocery retailers in 2018.

 

Apart from having an ecommerce website, hypermarkets are also investing on additional digital touch points such as a mobile ordering app, and ordering through home assistants such as Alexa, and Google Home etc. Allowing consumers to buy what they want from your inventory through endless aisles in store doesn’t just result in customer satisfaction but it also helps you mitigate loss of sale due to stock-outs.

 

Another popular way hypermarkets are elevating in-store consumer experience is through store associate apps, which can empower your frontline staff with additional information on products, availability of products, nutritional advice, recommendations, and even a single view profile of the customer so they can best serve them. Such solutions can bring the convenience and personalisation of online shopping to brick and mortar hypermarkets. They can help you increase engagement levels, dwell time and eventually basket size. Once such touchpoints have been established, the challenge lies in providing a consistent experience across all these physical and digital touchpoints.

 

Make Experiences Connected and Operations Efficient

 

Consumers today want, what they want, when they want it. This is especially true for hypermarkets where the increased demand for localised products and convenience means businesses have to fulfil consumer expectations through on-demand, hyperlocal delivery. But the last mile has always been the greatest challenge for hypermarkets that have gone online and its optimisation will continue to be a priority for 2018.

 

Providing consumers with multiple methods of purchase and fulfilment can go a long way towards consumer satisfaction as studies have pointed out, consumers are interested in online ordering, pick up in-store, and home delivery based on what is convenient for them at the time. There is also an increased preference for same day delivery. Offering multiple delivery options and providing consumers with the option of scheduling the time of delivery can help significantly elevate the purchase experience for consumers.

 

How integrated your store and warehouse systems are with your consumer touchpoints is going to determine how consistent consumer experience is across these touchpoints.

 

Furthermore, a consumer’s online purchase experience needs to be highly consistent with their offline experience. Apart from exclusive promotions in certain channels, consumers should be able to purchase the same products at the same prices with similar set of promotions across all channels. How integrated your store and warehouse systems are with your consumer touchpoints is going to determine how consistent consumer experience is across these touchpoints.

 

Integration of existing systems with Order and Warehouse Management Systems can help you fulfil accurately, efficiently and on time, every time.

 

Understand Consumers To Engage and Reward Them

 

People are different, and seek different things, different experiences. What’s memorable for one may be forgettable for another. As most hypermarkets cater to a highly diverse set of people, understanding what they really want and how to make their purchase experience better can feel complicated. The answer lies in your data.

 

Most hypermarkets are already maintaining a CRM system to keep track of their consumers and their transactions, but how often are you using this data to design personalised experiences for your consumers? Are you able to get a 360° single view of your consumer across channels and use this data to build consumer journeys? Are you able to accurately determine who your best consumers are and what are you doing to retain them, to keep them coming back?

 

Having accurate insights into your consumers helps you keep them engaged with your brand. It doesn’t just help marketing work better, but it also helps maximise consumer retention and loyalty.

 

 

As consumers have more choices than ever before, it’s really not easy to build loyalty and protect it. Grocery retailers must find ways to deepen emotional connections with consumers. Having accurate insights into your consumers helps you keep them engaged with your brand. It doesn’t just help marketing work better, but it also helps maximise consumer retention and loyalty. With the right consumer segmentation, based on consumer insights, you can ensure that all your communications are relevant and personalised and with a CRM program, you can get full visibility of your consumers and business across channels to ensure your communications are consistent.

 

But a CRM program alone isn’t going to be enough. Loyal consumers want to be recognised by the brand, and rewarded for their loyalty. They want to be a part of an exclusive club. Having a well designed loyalty program that complements your brand can be a great way to tap into greater consumer retention and higher repeat sales. But you must make your program easy to use.

 

Personalise Your Way to Profit

 

Personalisation is steadily becoming one of the biggest priority for retailers today as they gather more and more data into consumer behaviour and business performance. The challenge here is to use the data and derived insights effectively to push greater growth and profitability for your brand.

 

Studies say 31% of consumers are prone to switch grocers for personalised offers based on their buying behaviour. They seek experiences that are specifically tailored to them. 50% of users who stopped buying online, did so because they couldn’t easily find the products they were looking for. With personalisation of the storefront, such cases could be significantly reduced while more repeat sales with greater average basket value could be achieved.

 

Another trend in hypermarkets today are private label products. According to a PLMA study, sales of private label and store brands generated $120 billion in 2016 and will continue to grow significantly. Private labels offer retailers greater control over quality, price and hence profits. It’s no wonder then that most hypermarkets players have already established private label units.

 

But is there a way to combine the power of personalisation with the higher profits of private labels? Yes, with artificial intelligence based personalised recommendations and suggestive product bundles, you can push a greater number of private label and/or higher margin products to your consumers. Your consumers find what they were looking for, while you gain from greater margins and higher average basket values.

Running a CRM Driven Organization? Think Again.

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In our previous post we covered what it takes to track your CRM performance and chart the journey you want your program to take.

 

To get deeper into each of the dimensions we mentioned, we are kicking off this 5 part series which I’d like to call the “Think Again Series”. And in the first part, we will discuss the first key dimension of a successful a CRM program, Aligning your Organization.

 

Did you know, 50% of the CRM implementations fail to garner the results they are meant to? While this maybe due to a variety of reasons, but one of the main ones could be misaligned organizational objectives.

 

What I mean by misaligned organizational objectives is when your CRM exists and functions as a “nice to have” process in the organization. In the ideal CRM world, from top to bottom, the priority and resource allocation given to your CRM program should be at par with other major functions like marketing. But more often than not, we don’t see this happening.

 

In our extensive experience with countless brands around the globe, we have identified three dimensions of organizational alignment that you need to get right if you wish to see the success you meant to achieve with your CRM program. These are:

 

Functional Alignment

 

First things first. Does your organization realize the profit your CRM program can bring to the business? Does everyone – from the CX level teams to store associates – realize the gravity and importance of designing and implementing a truly customer centric program? Do you have centralized team that solely concentrates on all things CRM?

 

If your answer is a no to any of these, then your organization is not functionally aligned to support a world class CRM program.

 

Loosely put, CRM program is a process of creating lasting relationship with customers. But it actually includes other elements too – staff management at the stores, packaging products, campaign planning etc- all these will be effected from the insights you get out of your CRM program. Hence if you are not giving this function the love and attention it deserves, then you’re losing out on more than just relationships with customers.

 

Strategic Alignment

 

In many of the brands we deal with, we see that CRM behaves as a standalone team. Even though it has been given resources and budgets of its own, it does not bring the right kind of returns because it does not communicate internally with other teams.

 

Aligning your CRM objectives and plans with those of other departments like marketing is crucial to ensure your brand speaks to your customers in a single, consistent and streamlined fashion. Bombarding your customers 10 times in a month, for example, – 5 times for a marketing promo and 5 times for CRM related promos – will lead to customer fatigue and have the opposite effect to what you intended – your customers pushing themselves away from you.

 

So get your CRM teams in a room with the other related teams, and form a single, perfectly aligned strategy for your brand to help everyone hits their numbers and achieves their targets.

 

Vendor Alignment

 

As an organization, you will have multiple vendors who will be working towards meeting the objective you have set for them. But are they aware of the bigger picture? For example, does your creative agency know what goal you are trying to achieve with that video ad? Does your campaign management team know what this email campaign is meant to achieve? If your answer is anywhere between “sort of” to “no” – then you’re in trouble.

 

Making your vendors understand the bigger picture helps them perform much, much better. You will be surprised by the ideas and recommendations they come up with to help you get higher returns on every buck you spend.

 

So after your marketing and CRM team huddle, get your vendors together and share your mission with them. You will see how every team comes together to get you that sweet success of customer relationship management.

 

If you get these three attributes of your organizational readiness in a straight line, then we are confident you will be on track for a CRM program that is all set to see great results, for a long time to come.

 

Don’t forget to check out the next edition our Think Again Series – “Think you know your customers up close and personally? Think Again.”

 

Think you know your customers up close and personally? Think Again.

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In the previous post of our Think Again Series we covered the importance of organizational alignment in CRM strategy. Here we’ll be covering why it’s important to really know your customer.

 

As a business leader, you know the value of your customer. They form the main building block on which the success of your entire business is based. Over the past few decades, getting more information from these customers has become easy. You have multiple channels where your customers leave behind all kinds of data. But are you viewing this data in a consolidated fashion? Can you identify if the customer clicking on your Facebook Ad is the same or different from the customer who purchased from you yesterday?

 

This kind of understanding and clarity is what can set your brand sky rocketing, and we have identified 3 key attributes to assess how well you know your customers’ behaviors.

 

Identifying Customer Base

 

Like I mentioned, you have a hoard of data flowing in from every channel. But how efficiently can you identify who these data points belong to?

 

Many brands only limit themselves to capturing customer data from the store or the ecommerce site, and keeping them separate. Few brands actually have a mechanism to understand which customer visited me in-store and also came to me online – a cross channel customer tagging. And you want to be among those brand who do that.

 

Having a unique identifier for your customers, like mobile number or email address, across channels will help you make better sense of how your customer is interacting with you. This is extremely crucial in today’s omnichannel world where easily more than half of your customers would be interacting with your brand at more than one channel.

 

Single View of Customer

 

Customer data at businesses like yours do not and should not stop at just transaction data. This second attribute talks about how you need to ensure you are pooling in all kinds of data that help you build the personality of your customer. You should be able to answer questions like:

 

  • When does my customer visit me?
  • Has she responded to the SMS/Email promo I sent her the last time?
  • Which channel does she prefer to be contacted on?

 

And other such queries that really digs deep into explaining to you who your customer is.

 

A compete 360°, comprehensive view of your customer is what every brand needs to have. Achieving this will take you miles ahead of your competition.

 

Enriching Customer Data

 

Capturing your customer’s data is just step one. Following this, you need to ensure you are constantly enriching your understanding of the customer. You need to ensure you are growing with your customers in terms of their needs, their preference etc.

 

Incentivizing your customer to update their profile is a good start. However, today your customer is constantly interacting with your data on social media among other channel. Are you capturing this behavior as well? Are you able to tell how responsive your customer has become to Facebook ads today as opposed to SMSs a few months back?

 

Achieving this level of customer data enrichment will ensure your understanding of your base is up to date. This in turn will ensure every penny spent on your Customer Analytics program is giving you the right returns.

 

So that’s a snippet on getting up close and personal with your customers derived from Capillary’s 5D Framework. Hop on to the next post in our Think Again Series, “Have the best in class Analytics platform? Think Again”, to map where you stand on the analytics meter.

 

Have a best in class Analytics platform? Think Again.

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In the previous post of our Think Again Series we covered the importance of really knowing your customer. Here we’ll be talking about how strong your analytics platform can be.

 

Data is everywhere. We may have said this over and over again in different ways, in many of our blogs. But it still is overwhelming – it’s just everywhere.

 

As a part of our offering, we do help set up platforms and help businesses dig deep and generate insights from this data. And when we do this, we have seen that brands often tend to get myopic when it comes to making use of their data. For example, when they are gathering transaction data from the stores, they tend to be fixated in looking at sales numbers as just numbers. % increases and ROI figures are not just numbers. They tell a story about your brand, your customers, and your industry. If you are not seeing this, then you are missing out, big time.

 

As a part of our 5-part series on demystifying the 5 dimensions that decide the success of your CRM program, we will focus this one on the 3 attributes that spell the success or failure of your analytics platform.

 

Insight Generation

 

It all starts here. Once you have successfully captured the data from all possible channels, the next step is to read them and find out trends that help predict your business direction. Unfortunately, even today, many brands depend on manual scouring of data to identify these trends. If you are still doing this, then you are going to be left behind, way behind!

 

With the power of AI comes the power of precise prediction. Analytics tools that are based on machine learning tell you in advance what is going to happen to your business and what you should be doing next. You want to be here!

 

Insight Democratization

 

If the right people are not seeing the right insights at the right time, then your analytics effort – AI or otherwise – is of no use.

 

All the stakeholders should have access to the data they should be seeing – not more, and certainly not less – at any time of the day. Depending on platforms that require the person to be on premise to analyze and gather insights is like having a mobile phone that can only be used at home – pointless and a complete waste of investment.

 

Ramp up your platforms, make it cloud based. And don’t worry about security. Many leading analytics platform providers have international security audits and standards that they maintain. So you can be sure that your data is safe, while you make it easily accessible.

 

Insight Based Action

 

Coming back to the topic of silos – separating your insights from your actions (like promos, campaigns etc) will undoubtedly lead to your CRM efforts failing and not bringing any returns.

 

Your insights generation and campaign planning need to go hand in hand to ensure you are dynamically responding to the customers based on their changing preferences, tastes and behaviors. Separating these two, or even a delay in using the latest insights to tweak your campaigns may mean you’re deliberately losing out on delighting your customers, garnering loyalty, and, ultimately, money.

 

Break the walls between the different sub functions of CRM and let the platforms communicate with each other. Use the power of technology to automate the customer communication so that your CRM is dynamic, relevant and ringing your cash registers like never before.

 

So there you are – three attributes to judge how strong your analytics platform really is. Find out how you fare in this and the four other dimensions of CRM. We will be happy to assist you through this and help understand how you can make things better.

 

Also, check out the part 4 of our Think Again Series – “Have an A-level Engagement Model? Think Again.”

Have an A-level Engagement Model? Think Again.

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In the previous post of our Think Again Series we covered the importance of data and analytics maturity. Here we’ll be talking about how well your consumer engagement strategy should be designed.

 

As I mentioned in one of our previous blogs, engaging with your customers at real time is more than just sending them a thank you message after shopping. Today with the proliferation of channels, and maturity in technology, brands like yours need to go a notch higher with their engagement plans.

 

This means, redefining the word “personalization” to be more than just using first names. It means re-looking at your channel mix to use multiple channels together, instead of just one that you believe your customers prefer. And most importantly, it means re-examining your communication strategy to ensure it gives maximum returns from each message you send out.

 

And here’s how you can do that. In the spirit of us explaining what standards you should be aiming for when it comes to different aspects of your CRM program, here are 3 areas to check for when it comes it achieving nirvana in real-time customer engagement.

 

Channels of Engagement

 

No it isn’t enough that you can successfully send out SMSs and email to customers depending on their affinity to the channel. Studies show that more than 70% customers use 3 or more channels before they make a purchase. That means interacting with them simultaneously in at least 3 channels that you know they use, with the same message.

 

In order to have a successful CRM program in place, your brand should be where the customer is. Having a centralized campaign manager tool that allows to plan, design, execute, and track communication across all channels is the perfect solution for today’s digital age.

 

If you haven’t gotten one yet, invest in one – PRONTO!

 

Offer Effectiveness

 

If you are still stuck with the age old practice of sending offers and promos to all females for all female products, and all males for all male products, then you need to come out of Stone Age and embrace the 21st century – big time!

 

Offers need to targeted and personalized at various levels. Demographics is just one of them. Looking at the customer’s past purchase behavior tells you a lot about the kind of products they prefer. And many a times the user is not the buyer. Hence your generic offer to all males, may just be a big waste of campaign spend.

 

With competition graver than ever before, you need to get creative with your offers. Time them in such a way that you can reward the customers for every positive action they take, like purchase a slow moving product, referring customers, buying above your normal basket value, and so on. Get platforms in place that gives you the flexibility to reward your customers the way you want, and when you want. Anything below that, will lead your CRM strategy to reek of stale offers.

 

Personalized Communication

 

Yes, it all boils down to this. If you are able to send each customer a personalized offer, on the channels he/she actively uses with a message that is relevant to previous interactions the customer has made with your brand, then bravo – you have arrived at CRM paradise. Take a drink and chill!

 

If not, then you need to step on the gear and get some processes in place. With the advent of AI, you can now easily set up platforms that can predict the customers’ preferences in advance and tell you who should be targeted in what way (what messages, offers, channels etc). Up until now, this was usually done on a group level. But with AI, you can dive deeper and personalize your engagement in the true sense – at an individual level.

 

With these three checks in your engagement strategy, you can be sure that you are on the track to provide the best experience to your customers, thus garnering more loyalty.

 

While you’re at it, do read the last part of the Think Again Series, “CRM Success is not Linked to Technology Adoption? Think Again!” and let us know how you have been doing things differently to Ace your CRM Strategy.

CRM Success is not Linked to Technology Adoption? Think Again!

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In the previous post of our Think Again Series we covered the importance of having a well thought out customer engagement strategy. In our final installment of the series, we’ll be covering what technological factors can determine CRM program success.

 

Having a huge team doesn’t always mean you’re going to get the best results. More so with your CRM. With your customers demanding a more personalized interaction than ever before, it is impossible to deliver seamless, consistent experience with siloed teams and platforms.

 

And that is why the last part of our Think Again Series talks about, what areas of CRM determines its success, deals with technological integration in your organization.

 

To skip the fancy introductions and get on with it, here are three attributes that give you a clear picture on how integrated your platforms are and if they are giving you the expected results.

 

Data Capture

It’ll be too silly of me to think you still capture your data manually across all channels (please don’t tell me otherwise!). So skipping this, let’s talk about the different systems you have created to capture the data form your all your stores – online and offline. Do these systems talk to each other at some point? Does your team work on connecting data and customers across channels after the initial data capture?

 

If your answer is yes to any of these, then your CRM technology maturity is nowhere close to where it should be.

 

In today’s omnichannel world, your data capture and storage should also be omnicahnnel. This means having completely integrated systems across channels that recognizes a single customer across these channels, and stores data in a single repository. The more nodes you create for capture and storage of data, the worse your customer experience is going to be. So revisit your data capture systems and processes, and become omnichannel in the true sense.

 

Campaign Execution

 

Gone are the days when your campaign execution required additional steps of downloading the data and then uploading them into the campaign software.

 

In today’s realtime world, you cannot depend on separate platforms if you want to recognize trends and act on it immediately. Campaign platforms should sit on a single data warehouse where your data capture systems are constantly feeding it data and your campaign tool is interacting with the customers on the basis of new data points, dynamically.

 

Omnichannel CRM

 

It all boils down to this – if you need to deliver an omnichannel CRM externally, then all your platforms, and processes should also be omnichannel internally.

 

Standalone, non-connected systems and technological platform will leave gaps in your entire CRM strategy that will prove to be too expensive in more than one ways for your CRM journey. Concentrate on pulling all your systems together and tightening the loop holes. If this needs additional investments, I would say it’ll be worth every penny you spend! Remember, a completely integrated CRM suite reduces duplication across platforms and increases efficiency.

 

With that we conclude our Think Again Series on how to get your CRM program to deliver results you never thought possible. Do share your thoughts on what criteria you think decides the success or failure of a CRM program. We are all ears!!