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Customers have evolved their shopping practices and use multiple channels to search, compare and purchase products and services. For example, of the 40% of consumers who own smartphones, 70% use them while shopping in stores (Google & IPSOS OTX, April 2011). While online shopping sites provide an array of tools that help customers gain insight during the purchase decision process, retailers provide few such tools in stores. Customers are turning to their own devices to support decision-making in stores, and as such smartphones are becoming an integral part of the shopping experience. The next big challenge for retail is to determine how to use smartphones to engage with customers and drive purchasing by providing key insight during the purchase decision process. Retailers who can provide effective decision-making tools for in-store customers will open up a new channel through which to market and sell. Traditionally retail technologies have focused on providing business insight to store management. Now that customers are entering stores with technology inhand, the focus must expand to providing product insight to the customer as well. By providing customers with product insight, retailers can provide a differentiated experience that increases loyalty, which can in turn increase revenue.
How do you provide insight during the purchase decision process? By determining a customers context (see next page) and leveraging that knowledge to provide a customized in-store shopping experience. While customer databases can show what a customers purchase patterns are, they say little about who the customer is and what they are trying to achieve. Customer databases provide a view into people who decided to purchase but miss the potential customer who wanted to purchase, visited your store, and left without buying. To better serve customers and increase sales, retailers will need to learn more about who their customers are, what their needs are, and provide them with relevant insight into the products and services available. Accenture has developed an approach to providing customers with insight that involves combining new forms of customer data with traditional forms and leveraging this new view of the customer to create a set of services to aid the purchase decision process.
This approach uses a combination of social media profile data, customer purchase history, and customer behavior logs as forms of context to describe customers. Social profile data provides a much more descriptive and accurate profile of customers and is a largely untapped source of information. Although customer behaviors are tracked online, routinely very little information is collected about customer behaviors in stores. Combining social profile and customer behavior data with customer purchase history can create a rich picture of the customer, which retailers can use to better segment customers. Based on those segments, decision support services can be created for customers which would (1) help them find the right product and customize that product to their needs, (2) offer more than a sales experience, but a service that places shopping support in the palm of the customers hand, and (3) establish a new channel that enables direct communication with the retailer. This channel would allow retailers to learn more about the customer continually, and tune the in-store experience accordingly.
What is context?
We define context in retail as any information that characterizes a person and their past and current interactions with other people and technology at any point in the purchase decision process. In other words, retail context is comprised of a customer description (e.g., age, interests, and gender), past interactions with the retailer, and a description of the customers purchase environment (e.g., availability of friends, devices available, location, product being viewed, etc.). An example of retail context data for a customer shopping for a new smartphone might look like the following fictional scenario: Context Name Age Interests Value 45 Swimming, Orange Computer, Kacys Department Store, Hip Hop Music Female Illumatron 500, Precision X, Matrix One James Wall Facebook Wall Post Cranberry Flow 73 Friends Online Smartphone section, Great Gets Retail Store, Los Angeles CA Context Type Customer Description Customer Description
Gender Products Viewed Associate Interaction Peer Feedback Product Being Viewed Peer Availability Location
Customer Description Past Interaction Past Interaction Past Interaction Purchase Environment Purchase Environment Purchase Environment
the retailers smartphone app could be tuned to highlight relevant features. This could include displaying the movie and music streaming apps available, and the suitability of the display and audio for gaming and movie watching. Using this strategy, the customer benefits from a more personalized shopping experience and gets the support needed to reach a purchase decision in-store. In exchange for some personal information, customers can access an experience that surpasses the traditional one. This can take the form of relevant recommendations, ratings, information presented in the most easily consumable form, access to the experiences of friends, and more. For its part, the retailer gets to differentiate itself from its competitors and increase customer loyalty. The use of a smartphone as a shopping tool in the store provides retailers with access to the behaviors of customers and insight into how they interact with products. This data can be used to make decisions about store configurations and associated product placements. Providing a valued custom service opens up access to a wealth of information that retailers have traditionally found difficult to collect. Although more information about customers can certainly be useful, retailers must tread carefully where customers personal data are involved. Some customers may be quite reluctant to provide this type of information to the store, so retailers must avoid asking for more data than they need and must take every measure to protect the customers privacy. By earning the customers trust, retailers can enhance the customer experience while increasing their ability to sell. A reputation for sloppy handling of customers data is one of the fastest ways to at a minimum damage relationships with individual customers and even worse the public at large.
While its useful for the customer to know what friends think, there are cases in which the customers friends may not have shared their opinions. In such situations, its useful to have an overall picture of how people similar to the customer feel about a particular product. In this case, the customers social profile can be used to find social doubles, or similar people who have provided feedback on the product. This provides a measure of the buzz around that product based on similar people. Whether highlighting relevant products using all friends, subgroups of friends or people who are similar to the customer, using social media and purchase behavior logs can help filter the expansive set of product alternatives down to a manageable level for the customer. For the retailer, highlighting products based on friends interactions or the interactions of people who have similar purchasing history provide a method for predicting what the customer will look at in the store. This data can be used to fine-tune product recommendations and offers. Additionally, customers who look at those products in the store provide clues about what they find interesting. This information can be used to determine where hotspots and dead spots exist in the store. To better handle hotspots, management may want to deploy more associates to that area. For dead spots, management could put effort into developing strategies to generate more buzz and drive more interest toward those products.
Conclusion
In general context can be used to enhance user experiences. For retail, context gathered in-store can help personalize product content, highlight relevant products and provide easy access to feedback from peers. The result is an improved shopping experience and deeper ties between the retailer and customer. Understanding customers behavior in the actual store helps bridge the in-store and online channels, providing a seamless retail experience. No matter what the industry sector, the use of a customers context and activity (historical and current) can help to significantly improve the purchase experience. Using contextual data in other arenas requires identifying relevant information and using that information to provide additional benefits to stakeholders. Technology now enables the capture of all sorts of context. The time is right for using context to provide breakthrough innovation in customer services.
Contact Us
For more information, please contact: Brian M. Landry, Ph.D. brian.landry@accenture.com Kelly Dempski kelly.l.dempski@accenture.com
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with 257,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the worlds most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$27.9 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2012. Its home page is www.accenture.com.
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