Clarity Commerce Solutions

Modern customers are demanding. With so much choice available to them, shoppers are becoming more demanding of price, service and availability. Giving them the right experience consistently and conveniently is critical and this requires a sophisticated retail system.

It is therefore crucial to find the right software solutions that work with your engagement strategy, whether your focus is on rapid throughput, dynamic promotions, innovative membership schemes, multiple channels, personalised services, or all of the above.

Take ‘multiple channels’ for instance. It’s not enough to just make the channels available. You have to use them effectively to maximise their impact. Every channel has a sweet spot in your business, and by recognising and combining these into a single journey for your customer, you can drive higher sales.

Keeping pace with changing trends

With the constant change in retail and technology environments, you can’t afford to stand still. You need to know that as your requirements change, your systems will get your initiatives to market first. This requires software solutions that will deliver complete flexibility, with extensive configuration options and advanced SOA capability.

Emerging technologies can help you to maximise your strategy for customer engagement through sophisticated use of mobile and social networking environments. However, this software needs to be communicating with your central reporting system for it to be effective and deliver an advanced, supremely consistent service. A service that ensures your customers have a more fulfilling shopping experience with you.

Consistency is key

The retail ‘experience’ forms an important part of your customers’ shopping enjoyment, whether that’s in-store, online, when mobile or by mail order. Creating the right level of customer experience and engagement is critical to delivering profitable, loyal customers. Ideally, an effective customer engagement strategy should harness the best of breed software to:

• Engage the customer through any sales channel
• Create joined-up transactions on the web, in the store,on the move and even when ‘socialising’
• Extend the offer to the customer through targeted initiatives such as loyalty, gift cards and digital receipts
• Deploy uniquely personalised ‘on demand’ promotions to maximise results
• Deliver high service levels through mobile tools, booking services and information availability
• Control fraud across all channels through sophisticated control services such as returns management.

Your customers expect consistency, they have little sympathy when told that they can’t use their gift card in the restaurant or are unable to return a shirt in the electrical department because of a special promotion. Your base retail offer must be available at every location, and traditionally this has led to deployment of diluted but generic capability everywhere.

Your customers also expect specialism too. Your coffee shop must be as good as the ones outside and your electrical sales team must be as adept as the more focused competition.

How do you ensure that your customer’s entire experience is consistent across promotions, loyalty, returns, membership schemes and orders – and that they get the best service at every location?

You need system consistency. Without it, your new initiatives will be slow to market, expensive and difficult to manage. For instance, having to change your loyalty program with three different POS solutions and three suppliers is a costly headache.

The only long-term solution is an investment in a system that you create once and deploy to all locations, regardless of the format – minimising development, testing and deployment costs. Then the underlying interaction with the rest of your systems remains consistent, ensuring that you get a reliable, single view of all information.

Once deployed, your support staff only need to be trained on one system, improving efficiency and problem resolution times, and cutting costs.

Meeting new challenges

Once you have system consistency and your requirements increase, you can extend your capability by taking more modules, secure in the knowledge that they will operate with your existing system.

At the same time, for highly personalised requirements where you need something that is non-standard, an extensive SOA capability should be introduced to enable you to create new capability without diverting you from your base product.

Controlling operations and fraud needs rapid decisions and you require real-time information to stay on top. By implementing a centralised online authorisation service should give you tight control of features such as refunds, staff discounts, loyalty, gift cards and shopper discounts.

Continuous customer engagement

The most effective sales approach includes ongoing dialogue with your existing customers. Making sure that they are happy, understanding their needs and remind them about your great products and services. This requires more than the occasional postal voucher campaign or worse, cluttering their inboxes with yet more spam.

A sophisticated software solution should enable you to engage with the customer on a regular basis by making it part of their regular routine. Don’t wait for the next store visit, or even worse, their first visit to a competitor. When they are not in store or buying from you online, draw them to your information portal by providing services that they will want to use.

For example, a digital receipt service provides a comprehensive set of features that your customers will want to use regularly and gives you the tools to engage with them and promote offers and services every time that they do.

Tap into your customer’s mobile and social networking lifestyle. It’s hard to compete with the convenience of your customer’s mobile phone or the compelling engagement of their social network – so embrace them and use them to your advantage to create loyalty to your brand. With innovative social media and mobile applications you can maximise the time that your customers spend you and even make use of their friendship groups in the sales cycle.

Making the transaction convenient is another way to keep the continuous cycle of customer engagement going. For your regular, loyal customers especially, the start and end of a transaction is an inconvenience, particularly when they’ll be back buying again soon. By creating a ‘continuous basket environment your customers don’t need to have artificial start and end points. Let them add to their basket whenever they want to and make payment via checkpoints at regular intervals or thresholds. This will encourage higher spend levels and allow you to communicate offers that span weeks or months rather than ones that trigger in a single transaction.

Information when it’s needed

The information needs of a modern retail enterprise now extend beyond operational processes and encompass suppliers, staff and customers too. Your IT system needs to be sophisticated enough to deliver trustworthy, reliable data wherever and whenever it is needed. Your supply chain needs sales data, the marketing team wants live campaign outcomes, and loss prevention staff have to reconcile diverse information. A centralised system makes sure that each part of the business gets exactly the information that it needs in a way that allows informed decisions. A system that can deal with huge volumes of critical commercial information and apply rigorous procedures to ensure that the information is cleaned, normalised, aggregated and consolidated before it is passed to you. Ensuring consistency across your multiple brands or formats to meet enterprise wide requirements.

The right software system adds value to your service

To deliver great service, your staff need to have the right information at their fingertips when they engage with the customer. What has the customer bought before? What is their loyalty status? What offers are available to this customer? Which products would you recommend as an upsell? And don’t ignore the customer’s information needs. They have access to competitive information which could drive them out of your store if you don’t provide the information that they need on demand. As previously stated combining your channel strategies ensure that your customers stay engaged with you at all times.

Fraud and loss prevention is the biggest single pain point for any retailer. The growing number of sales channels, card based services and increasingly complex customer offers all increase retailers’ financial exposure. You have to use the information on hand to close down opportunities for fraud by customers and by staff. Sophisticated online authorisation services can detect and eliminate any losses at the earliest possible stage. Fraudsters will exploit any weaknesses in your processes for refunds, staff discounts and shopper discounts. You need to ensure that you can continue to deliver the right service to the honest majority by blocking opportunities for the dishonest few.

The IT partnership is just as important as the software installed

Your IT partner should be offering you peace of mind through reliability and expertise, be experienced professionals who understand the world of Retail. A close partnership that ensures you get the most from your IT infrastructure, someone who can help you to refine your approach, bringing fresh ideas and advising on how to optimise your own.

Innovative but robust IT solutions are vital to your everyday operations and any IT service team should ensure rapid, low risk deployments through detailed planning and high quality processes. After deployment, a dedicated support service should work with your operations staff to ensure smooth running and to manage the change process as your own strategy evolves.