Retail and consumer brands responded to the challenges of 2020 with admirable resilience, agility, and innovation. In a short time, they launched a variety of new services and customer experiences. These included options to buy-online-pickup-in-store, virtual appointments, flexible payment options, and livestream ecommerce.
As a result, customer expectations for what makes a great digital experience have increased. In fact, more than 80% of B2B and B2C customers now believe the experience provided by a company is as important as its products or services.
Delightful retail experiences help to drive brand loyalty and create lifelong customer connections. This can have a significant impact on the bottom line over the long-term.
All that energy and innovation around the customer experience has changed retail and consumer brands forever. Now the challenge is to continue this spirit of innovation and deliver delightful customer experiences consistently.
Meeting the demand for more personalised experiences
In a recent webinar, Matt Marcotte, Salesforce Global Head of Retail and Consumer Goods Industry Advisors, shared his advice on how to deliver exceptional customer experiences. He said it comes down to three things:
- Actionable customer data
- The ability to personalise customer experiences
- Optimisation of consumer engagement and experience
Getting to a single source of truth for customer data is the ultimate goal, particularly for retail and consumer brands. Solutions like Salesforce Customer 360 bring sales, marketing, commerce, and service together around a single view of customer data on an integrated platform.
Customer data needs to be collected, consolidated, and stored securely in a place where teams can access it as needed. When teams have a shared understanding of the customer, they can work together to create more personalised customer experiences.
“Finding technologies that really make the collection of data, the creation of the single source of truth, the ability to talk across systems and departments easily, is really something that all companies should be striving to do,” Matt says.
One great tool for this purpose is Tableau. It can help analyse your customer data and provide a deeper understanding of customers. These insights help to identify further opportunities for personalisation and uncover customer trends within your data.
“Personalisation doesn’t need to be as complicated as it sounds to implement,” Matt says.
“It all starts with intent and a relentless focus on putting the customer at the centre of everything that you do as a brand. Then, find ways to use technology and data to get to know them better.”
Creating consistency across platforms
The ability to connect your planning and execution within the same platform is critical for personalising and optimising your consumer engagement. Matt says this helps brands to create a holistic view of the customer that lets them:
- Unlock growth
- Improve program execution
- Build better pricing strategies
- Develop more effective promotional activities and channel incentives
Luxasia, the leading omni-channel partner for luxury beauty and lifestyle brands in the Asia-Pacific region, is a great example of this in action. They develop personalised beauty experiences and connected customer journeys for customers online, offline, or in-store.
The Luxasia team knows that they are selling emotional connections as much as physical products. They use feedback and customer data to help them make beauty more personalised through relevant product recommendations.
Consistent, excellent experiences like these develop stronger relationships with customers and drive loyalty over the long term.
“Consumers make decisions based on how they feel. As brands, part of getting to know customers is building relationships, and relationships are emotional,” Matt says.
This is reflected in Salesforce’s most recent State of the Connected Customer report. It found that 66% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.
“So, in a world of increasingly endless choices and commoditised products, the experience the consumer has with the brand is really important,” Matt says.
As retail and consumer brands optimise these experiences, we will see the impact this can have on building loyalty and lifetime relationships. With Salesforce as a partner, retail and consumer brands can deliver exceptional customer experiences and build their customer base.
Find out how retail and consumer goods brands are enhancing customer experiences with Salesforce. Tune in to watch the webinar on-demand.
