Personalization in Retail

Where We Are

Shoppers, especially younger ones, increasingly do not differentiate between online and offline channels. Rather, they think only about the fact that they’re engaging with a brand. Whether that engagement is in the digital realm, the physical realm, or more and more often, some combination, is less important to them. These shoppers want and expect a brand to know who they are as they move from online to offline and back.

As a result, retailers with a mix of online and offline sales channels who successfully unify their customer data, inventory and sales systems are best positioned to serve and to benefit from rapidly evolving shopper needs and expectations. Unified systems enable unified online and offline experiences. Each can inform the other, thereby dramatically increasing opportunities for personalized shopping, impactful content delivery and, perhaps most importantly, elevated customer service.

The Promise of Digital in Retail

With unified systems as a foundation, the retail shopping experience in particular can evolve in very significant ways. It can be greatly enhanced by utilizing many of the same tools that are typically used online, especially those for personalization.

In the retail store, the shopper-facing digital ecosystem to support this unified experience ideally consists of 3 main interface components:

• The shopper’s own device

• Interactive displays in the store (whether tablet or large screen display)

• Store Associate equipped with an assisted selling tool or clienteling app

In the background, the unified systems (customer data, inventory, orders) enable those customer-facing systems above to do at least some, and sometimes all, of the following:

• Know the shopping history and preferences of an individual shopper

• Know the shopping history and preferences of the local community

• Provide full visibility into store inventory and product availability to help draw in local customers who otherwise might only shop online

• Drive interaction with a Store Associate equipped with the tools to provide expert shopping guidance and customer service.

Retail and 1:1 Marketing

Driving interaction with a store associate is extremely important. In the retail environment, the biggest and most important differentiator compared to other channels is the human element. Particularly in fashion, beauty and lifestyle, there is a shift toward a concierge model in retail that is geared toward providing a high level of customer service in-store. When a brand interacts with a shopper, unified customer data coupled with a personalization engine can help that brand do a really good job predicting what a customer might want or need right now, but it never knows for sure.

However, a Store Associate routinely poses an ordinary but powerful question – “How can I help you?” Ultimately, that human interaction provides the greatest and most impactful opportunity to not only achieve 1:1 marketing, but to develop strong brand affinity for a new customer or to deepen the brand relationship with an existing customer.

Getting Started

Getting all of these pieces in place is challenging. Beyond the difficulties of unifying various systems, potentially changing organizational structure and operations, as well as designing and building the customer-facing platforms, there is the task of gathering multi-channel data and setting up the analytics to make sense of it all so that you can leverage its power. Fortunately, there are some ways even smaller retailers can get going on this.

There are ways to start down the path to gathering data for both in-store and online shopping behaviors, tying them together and then pairing that data with with a personalization engine. With a few key pieces, brands can enable customers to get a highly relevant and powerful digital experience on all digital channels and, critically, empower Store Associates so that they are able to do high-level clienteling and customer service in those all-important human interactions.

The first and most foundational step is to implement an optimization and personalization engine on your ecommerce site (if you haven’t already). Once your ecommerce system is up and running with an optimization and personalization engine, the goal is to extend these features and capabilities into the physical retail space.

This extension can most readily find its way into physical retail shopping in two main components: a shopper’s own device and an assisted selling or clienteling tool in the hands of a Store Associate. Assuming each of these experiences has the ecommerce and personalization platforms at their core, much can be done to present relevant and compelling content to the shopper at the right time and place.

For each of these interface options to enable personalization, it’s critical for the system to accomplish two things:

• Recognize when a shopper is in or near the retail store

• Match that shopper to a stored profile that includes shopping history and behaviors, if any

If these can be achieved, a world of personalization opportunity is opened up.

Making the Most of an App

The shopper’s own device provides the best opportunity for a retailer to automatically know the shopper’s location. The device can present a personalized shopping experience via a retail app or, with some work, via a progressive web app (PWA). Each can enable location detection through one or more of the following:

• Geo-fencing

• Bluetooth beacons

• Near-field communication (NFC)

• Store wifi

If location detection is not automatic or if the user has elected not to share that information, a manual check-in is required.

Whether app or PWA, each would typically have access to a user’s shopping history and behaviors across all devices through a stored profile. With location awareness and access to shopping history, brands can deliver personalized messaging, notifications, product recommendations and other types of creative, pertinent and compelling content.

One retailer doing a great job of utilizing this personalization strategy is Barneys. This classic New York retailer offers both a shopping app and an editorial content app, coupled with beacon technology. This allows Barneys to recognize shoppers when they are near the store, as well as where they are in the store, to send personalized messages and content informed by their recent shopping behavior and current location.

Beacons trigger the push of relevant content, such as videos, look books and designer interviews from The Window, Barneys’ luxury editorial site, when users are near or in the store. These beacons are integrated with the Relevance Cloud platform to enable delivery personalized recommendations of content to users who choose to opt-in for this experience via the Barneys New York app. The app also delivers personalized notifications when a shopper nears items currently in their shopping bags or wish list.
 

Empowering Store Associates

Even if a brand doesn’t have its own retail shopping app or a PWA-driven mobile shopping experience, there is still a great opportunity to personalize the in-store shopping experience — and it is potentially the most powerful. By placing a tablet-based assisted selling tool or clienteling app in the hands of your Store Associates, you can greatly elevate in-store customer service and give personalized, expert shopping guidance in the following ways:

• Provide product suggestions and recommendations, especially when a user is recognized in the system

• Provide deeper product information

• Enable endless aisle shopping

• Enable full checkout with an integrated POS

At bottom, this Store Associate-facing experience is simply a tablet-based responsive version of your regular ecommerce site. Assuming there is a personalization engine behind the scenes, and the system is enabled to identify the shopper, it can be utilized to help the Store Associate more fully understand that customer’s shopping preferences and history. With that information readily available, a skilled Store Associate is enabled to do full clienteling and to make that customer feel understood, taken care of, and valued by the brand. Look no further than shoe giant Aldo for an example of how to do this well. Aldo’s customer app and in-store displays enable endless aisle shopping. In addition, Store Associates are equipped with assisted selling tools that enable them to provide more detailed product information, going beyond what is available in the app or touch displays. Shoppers can even utilize the app to “call” a Store Associate for service. Dedicated runners are on-hand to quickly retrieve items that the shopper would like to see or try on, allowing the Store Associate to remain with the customer and continue building the relationship.