Retail

Many leading retailers have invested heavily over the past decade to implement the capabilities needed to manage customer interactions at multiple points of contact. These capabilities include:

• Point of sale systems capable of capturing customer and shopping basket data
• Databases to capture information on customer shopping behavior
• Credit cards to assist the customer with more payment terms including monthly statement mailers
• Loyalty programs to motivate customers to identify themselves when they shop with websites providing special preferred offers
• In store kiosks for customer servicing and advertising special offers
• Direct mailings to make special seasonal and segment-specific offers
• Websites for online shopping
• Call centers for inbound customer servicing and order taking, as well as outbound customer selling
• Servicing staff to provide installation and other post-sales support

With these capabilities in place, retailers are now looking to leverage these many points of connected customer interaction as opportunities to increase customer revenues and profitability through applying the principles one-to-one collaboration. In the past few decades some retailers have even implemented “loyalty programs” in an effort to build “community” and to create a “win-win” company-customer exchange opportunity.

It is now possible to take this basic “connected retailing” infrastructure and transition it into a proit-enhancing customer collaboration capability.

By adding the ESI exchange solution capability to their current CRM infrastructure, retailers can version the customer treatments/experience to maximize customer profitability. Customer exchange rules can be versioned by type of interaction, channel and customer segment to maximize profitability. For example:

• Terms on store credit cards can be versioned according the customer’s preferences and what they are willing to give in return. A customer agreeing to greater spending in the store and on the card might earn a lower introductory APR in return
• Shoppers who spend more than the prior year in a current holiday period, shop in new categories, etc would be able to earn special privileges and benefits in return
• Retailer loyalty programs typically have a single fixed set of “reward” rules that usually simply confer more benefits on existing customers who often do not bring any new business in return. These programs can be upgraded to become an “exchange program” where members are given the opportunity to develop personalized solutions that result in more optimal member value exchanges. Member exchange rules can be versioned to earn a greater return on program benefit expenditures

Some retailers are even looking at adding 21st century community-building functionalities such as chat, customer feedback, wikis, blogs etc. to further enhance benefits of cross and inter-community member collaboration.