Measuring Customer Engagement in Real-time with AI

Singles Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, 12.12 sales, and what not! This is hands down the busiest time of the year for any retailer. Managing end of year sales and giveaways to customers high on festive mood is no child’s play.

The best time for retailers is when the streamers and the confetti settle down. The smell of sweet ROI and increased YoY sales is better than any pumpkin spiced lattes or roasted turkey, but here’s a secret, measuring your customer engagement and campaign performance at the end of the holiday period is so last season! With the power of AI and advanced reporting technology at your disposal, you can track, tweak and improve your campaigns in real-time, on the go to maximise your growth on every channel.

This holiday season, we thought of bringing your stores to the limelight. It is presumed that out of all the channels, this is the hardest one to measure and collate real time data for, however, with the right resources at hand, this can be a piece of cake. So here are the four top metrics that you definitely should be tracking if you want to be flying high at the end of it all.

1. Foot Traffic

This is the most crucial factor that can make or break the fate of your holiday campaigns.

What does it mean to me – Higher foot traffic translates to higher chances of sales. You need to track it on a real-time basis to know the right number of staff you need for each week of the month, day of the week, and hour of the day. Not just that, you can also correlate fluctuations in footfall traffic data with your marketing campaigns to find out if your campaigns are bringing consumers into stores. By tracking this in real-time you can optimize the campaigns effectively and maximize sales.

How do I track this – Most of the footfall counters out there are based on Infrared, Bluetooth beacons, thermal cameras and other camera based technologies that may or may not give you accurate results. AI and machine learning has made it possible to have advanced human detection algorithms that are very accurate. Products like Capillary VisitorMetrix are based on such algorithms and even have the capability to differentiate your staff from a genuine customer hence giving you an accurate count of foot traffic.

2. Sales and more

Don’t just track sales figures. Slice and dice it to reveal more about your customer’s purchase patterns.

What does it mean to me – Break down your sales figures and calculate the average transaction value, average basket size and the total number of sales made. These figures though basic, go a long way in analyzing campaign responsiveness. You can then work your magic to steer the promotions in the direction you initially wanted it to go. Courts Malaysia does this beautifully on a regular basis to get extremely high repeat sales percentages.

How do I track this – A centralized reporting tool will enable you to have a third eye into your campaign performance. Reports that automatically and at real-time pull data from all the touch points and crunch the data to present meaningful and actionable insights to you is the way to go here. Brands like KFC who have countless touch points and a mammoth amount of data have achieved this. Then what’s stopping you?

3. Conversion Rate

The mother of all metrics. You want to know how efficient your staff and promotions are? This is your go to KPI.

What does it mean to me – Want to know how your promotion did? Want to know if your store staff are actually ensuring they convert every customer that walks in the store? Want to ensure your store planning is perfect? Then this is the number you want to keep an eye on. Tracking this periodically – hourly, daily and weekly will help you identify and track trends that you wouldn’t have seen before.

How do I track this – You need connected devices at your store. By this I mean your people counter, your POS data and your reporting tool need to be integrated for you to be able to monitor this no matter where you are. Capillary VisitorMetrix, for example, uses AI algorithm to identify a customer entering the store accurately and then feeds this information along with the POS sales figures, at real-time to a reporting tool to give you hourly, daily, weekly and monthly conversion rates.

4. New vs returning customers

Common fact to all retailers: it’s 5 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one. So it’s pretty clear why this is our last, but certainly not the least, point.

What does it mean to me – Apart from knowing how many new and old customers your promotions attracted, knowing instantly if a customer who walked into your store has purchased with you previously or not gives the stores the kind of power they never had before. Capillary Loyalty+ solutions have been adopted by world’s leading brands to track on a real-time basis if a customer visiting the store is a one-time, repeat or new customer and have setup practices to use this information to enhance the customer experience at the store.

How do I track this – Real-time reporting helps you analyze this easily no matter where you are. Solutions like Capillary Insight+ that has AI powered predictive models, you will be able to not only see the live numbers but also think and plan ahead of time so that you make most of the opportunity this festive season has to offer.

So there. Those were our four uber-important KPIs that you need track to ensure your stores perform the best this year. Reach out to us and let’s talk more on how you have been tracking your holiday season sales and how it has worked for you. We are all ears!

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Marketing Manager, SEA at Capillary Technologies, Azmeen handles lead generation, content marketing and PR for the entire SEA region. She has also had extensive experience in helping brands such as Tunglok Group, Pizza Hut and KFC get consumer ready by implementing tech forward consumer experience and consumer relationship initiatives.