Getting closer to your customers — Retail & CG Highlights: June Edition
Engaging consumers during the shopping experience is essential for today’s retailers and consumer goods manufacturers. But it’s easier said than done. The 25th Annual RIS/Gartner Retail Tech Trends Study shows that increasing customer engagement is the number one pain point retailers plan to dedicate significant resources to solving.
In the industry’s quest for innovative ways to connect with customers and personalize their engagement, today’s wave of digital technology—in all its different forms—is making it easier to do that. In this month’s Retail & CG update, we put the spotlight on three technology advancements we’ve been discussing that can help you get closer to your customers.
Three Technology Innovations for Customer Engagement
Personalized marketing through mobile devices is one way to get closer to your customers. It offers an opportunity to reinvent the shopper experience by increasing promotion redemption rates and nurturing a deeper level of customer engagement.
In a recent discussion with RIS News and mobile engagement platform provider VMob, we dig deeper into IoT’s potential for optimizing shopper engagement in store, highlighting examples and real ROI results including cases with 700 percent increased engagement and 40-50 percent spend increase on repeat visits!
In food retailing, restaurants are also shifting IT focus away from efficiency and governance, towards customer-centricity, and going digital as they explore new ways to better serve and engage with their customers. In this area, digital tableside technology has tremendous benefits for both customers and restaurants.
Having tableside access to technology lets guests control their experience while also engaging directly with the restaurant brand in more meaningful ways. These latest technology innovations have now opened the door for Chili’s to take its loyalty program fully digital, becoming the first leading restaurant to integrate its loyalty program with tabletop technology. You can hear more from us on the tableside digital dining experience, and read STORES magazine’s perspective as well.
And the real power in getting closer to your customers lies in your data. Those retailers and consumer goods manufacturers that take advantage of today’s advancements in analytics and connectivity to successfully harness their data will have a significant advantage over companies that don’t. In manufacturing, those companies have the potential to raise an additional $371 billion in revenue!
By bringing together big data insights, predictive analytics and powerful visualizations, consumer goods manufacturers can build better customer engagement models and uncovering new value-added and personalized services and experiences for consumers that go along with their product like contextual information for a video game they are playing or predictive maintenance for their car. Read more in our recent CG-related blog post.
In my next update in August, we’ll bring you Microsoft’s perspective on the annual Consumer Goods Sales and Marketing Summit and connecting marketing, sales, service and data to help brands shift to a proactive customer experience model. We’ll also share insights from The Global Summit of the Consumer Goods Forum later this month.
In the meantime, make sure to mark your calendar for the release of Windows 10 on July 29!
