#clienteling

Delight customers with beautiful and engaging apps: There have been many arguments around whether retailers should invest in a mobile-optimized site or app. To put it bluntly, you need both. A mobile-optimized site is imperative for improved search engine listings and to create a great experience for casual browsers. However, apps are key for your more engaged and loyal shoppers. Think about how you can incorporate valuable tools and services into apps to better educate and empower your shoppers as they browse and buy. Apps also are imperative for the associate-facing experience. For example, ALDO is using in-store mobile technology to create a more immersive brand experience. The retailer created a series of apps that provide fingertip access to items, trend and style information and even product recommendations based on consumers’ closets.

Create one-to-one browsing and buying journeys: In the current omnichannel climate, personalization has become the name of the retail game. As a retailer, you not only need to create a consistent experience across all channels, you also need to ensure these experiences are aligned with the unique preferences of individual customers.  Take cues from HauteLook, which sifts through a plethora of data across its e-Commerce storefront, mobile site and app, as well as social media and email to understand customer preferences. From there, the retailer can better understand what brands, categories and event types resonate with consumers. Then, HauteLook creates highly customized, yet automated, emails and campaigns. 

Re-personalize the store with clienteling: Many consumers still treasure the in-store shopping experience. Whether they prefer to touch and feel products, or simply enjoy interacting with associates, consumers definitely don’t want the store to go away. However, retailers can make the brick-and-mortar experience more fun and memorable by implementing mobile clienteling! Clienteling is an integral part of the Design Within Reach (DWR) experience. Selling high-end modern furniture and home decor, DWR sales reps use iPads and iPads to show presentations, enter new leads or opportunities and place orders. They also can access customer profiles, which include vital selling information such as the products they’ve browsed online. 

Connect retail operations: In order to remain competitive and drive customer satisfaction, retail executives need to keep a constant pulse on chain-wide sales, marketing campaigns and service inquiries. With the right software, mobile devices can extend real-time business data to all the key players, including store managers and employees.  Sprouts Farmers Market leverages the Salesforce Service Cloud to extend customer inquiries, questions and feedback sent across email, chat, phone and the web to stores. Reports are generated and updated in real time, so the executive team and store managers can improve store performance and experiences. 

Create and cultivate brand ambassadors: The unprecedented growth of social networks like Facebook and Instagram reaffirms that consumers love to interact with peers and thought leaders. Mobile apps can help bridge the connection between shoppers if there is a designated community area to share images and comments, and ask questions.  Rossignol, a provider of mountain sports, skiing and snowboarding equipment, has created a mobile-optimized community to build passion among fans and followers. Users can create their own social profiles and interact with each other. Through the Ski Pursuit mobile app, consumers also can track their ski performance, average speed, distance and more. Bottom line: Rossignol is bringing the brand to the next level by creating and promoting a lifestyle. 

Support Cross-Platform Mobile Solutions Cross platform mobile development is one of the best practices a retailer can adopt.  There are several app development frameworks available that allow companies to develop for multiple platforms.  These frameworks enable retailers to create solutions that target more devices and users, while writing a minimal amount of source code.  This not only makes it easier for retailers to support more consumers, but it also keeps development costs low.   From an engagement level, a native app experience is superior so retailers looking to offer cross-platform solutions should consider platforms that provide ready-to-use apps with best practices built-in for iOS and Android.

Provide An Omnichannel User Experience

To remain relevant in the fast-paced world of mobile development, retailers should provide an omnichannel user experience that includes all channels through which consumers can interact with their business — with mobile as the most engaging and the glue that connects the different channels.  This goes beyond traditional channels, including retailers’ mobile web sites, to include things like mobile apps for consumers.  With an omnichannel offering that takes into account all mobile channels -- with a tie back into retailers’ back-end systems like in-store, loyalty and e-Commerce, for example -- retailers can drive commerce by giving consumers multiple ways to engage with their businesses and purchase goods.    

Nurture Customers Over Time By focusing on recurring customers and their needs and desires, retailers can devise and customize mobile offerings to drive sales, bolster loyalty and increase satisfaction. Providing special services via a mobile app, for example, helps to increase customer engagement.  Take a look at CVS, which recently launched its mobile app with returning customers in mind. It focuses on things they needed most:  personalized prescription to-do lists and coupons based on shopping patterns. Because CVS concentrated on core customers first, the app has been downloaded over four million times and received rave reviews from customers.

Engage Customers With Interactive Apps When designing your mobile strategy, keep interactivity in mind.  Retailers that provide an engaging user experience see higher sales and customer satisfaction. These strategies include options like push notifications for in-store offers, the ability to create shopping lists, price comparison, in-store self-checkout and retail store locators, among others.  A traffic-intensive mobile web site is great for SEO and onboarding new customers, but customers can then be driven to highly engaging mobile apps.  Consider pre-built apps with retail-specific business processes included, to save money on development costs and speed time to deployment. 

Empower Your Salesforce With Clienteling Tools Mobile may not be top-of-mind when thinking about the in-store experience, but it plays a key role in clienteling. Clienteling holds many benefits for both the consumer and retailer, and any brick-and-mortar business that wants to compete with online retailers should consider salesforce empowerment to stay relevant in today’s marketplace. Clienteling has been shown to enhance customer service by providing responsive in-store support and giving customers as much, if not more, product information as an online retailer.   These innovations allow consumers to have a more personalized shopping experience, as associates can provide what customers need on the spot, whether that’s product details, inventory levels or even the customer’s history if desired, via a mobile device, and help to drive sales as a result.  

The mobile channel presents a great opportunity for retailers to engage with consumers, bolster customer satisfaction and loyalty and drive sales.  By employing the five strategies outlined, you will be well positioned to capitalize on the many benefits that mobile -- and all of its facets -- has to offer.

That’s where indoor location technology really ushers in a new generation of clienteling. By providing shoppers with mobile applications that reward them for their in-store visit, and combining with an indoor location platform that automates identification of their arrival for store associates, retailers will be able to leverage real-time customer and potential product information. Armed with this rich information, sales associates on sales floors will be able to connect customers with personalized products and more relevant deals rather than storewide offers and products garnered towards the masses.