attune Whitepaper - How Fashion Businesses Can Win the Race for Omnichan...
A Fashion Brand's Guide to Building Consumer Intimacy in the Digital Age
1. WHITE PAPER
RECOMMENDED PRODUCT
Based on Purchase History
A FASHION BRAND’S GUIDE TO
BUILDING CONSUMER INTIMACY
IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Liked by 200K people
2. Introduction
Given the context of today’s retail industry, it is clear that a
customer-obsessed business model has become the new
frontier.
But achieving this objective is not so simple. Why? Because
consumer intimacy is not merely a one-dimensional approach
of monitoring the customer across channels, or about
communicating through new platforms. It is about managing
the entire customer relationship across all channels in real-time
to achieve a true connection - one that fosters loyalty,
advocacy and continuous engagement.
This guide shows fashion businesses how to meet these
objectives by leveraging complete visibility of customer
interactions across all touchpoints to get closer to the
consumer and achieve a competitive edge in today’s
ever-complex omni-channel landscape.
You have to be totally connected with everyone that touches your
brand. If you don’t do that, I don’t know what your business model
is in five years.” - Angela Ahrendts, Former CEO of Burberry & Current SVP,
Retail and Online Stores at Apple
3. 3|
The New Retail Battleground
Unfortunately, most retail organizations lack
the holistic view of their customers to fully
understand and react to customers’ needs
- resulting in missed opportunities to forge
better relationships with them.
Decision-makers are impeded by barriers
such as customer data silos, poor data quality
and misaligned business strategies -
preventing them from developing a
comprehensive view of each customer.
This thwarts any effort to deliver the right
experience to the right person at the right
time. The outcome – a disjointed customer
experience.
Executives seeking to build highly unified
and unique customer experiences are left
immobilized as a result, requiring a fast and
innovative platform that can engineer
exceptional consumer intimacy moments
in real time - not only on the path to
purchase but also throughout the longer
arc of a customer/brand relationship. When
carefully coordinated and synchronized,
these moments help drive brand preference
and cultivate brand advocates in a time of
otherwise diminishing customer loyalty.
To better meet the demands of increasingly
discriminating consumers and develop more
effective strategies, we’ve outlined 5 factors
that fashion retailers should consider when
evaluating their consumer intimacy strategy
in the digital era.
• Understand their preferences
• Provide mobile deals
• Give them a reason to shop in-store
• Let them shop the way they want
• Make a personal connection
Today’s consumer wants brands to:
Today’s hyper-connected, empowered consumer continues to take the lead in defining the
retail experience. With rapid access to pricing and product information, they switch
between retailers at will – rewarding only those who are able to deliver personalized,
immersive shopping experiences.
4. | 4
What the C-Suite Should Expect
Consumer
Intimacy
Builds
Loyalty
Improves Customer
Retention
Drives
Advocacy
Chief Executive Offi
Enhances better deci
accurate data to analy
help set an effective b
Chief Product Desi
Empowers ability to p
when designing and
Chief Marketing Offi
Heightens ability to p
customer at the right
preventing churn
Chief Information O
Boosts capabilities in
experience by leverag
shape business strate
and optimize custome
Chief Supply Chain
Improves alignment o
chain partners by pre
responding to change
significantly reducing
Consumer Intim
Strategic Plann
“A customer who is fully engaged represents an average 23% premium
in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth
compared with the average customer.”
- Gallup Research
Consumer Intimacy Improves Strategic
Planning Across the C-Suite
Chief Executive Officer
Enhances better decision-making by leveraging accurate
data to analyze business performance and help set an
effective business agenda
Chief Product Designer
Empowers ability to predict demand and new trends when
designing and pricing new product offerings
Chief Marketing Officer
Heightens ability to predict the right offer for the right
customer at the right time, while simultaneously
preventing churn
Chief Information Officer
Boosts capabilities in providing a better customer
experience by leveraging actionable intelligence to shape
business strategies, improve product planning and optimize
customer-facing processes
Chief Supply Chain Officer
Improves alignment of resources and global supply chain
partners by predicting and dynamically responding to
changes in consumer demand and significantly reducing
out-of-stocks and markdowns.
5. | 5
Five Essential Steps for a Successful Consumer Intimacy Strategy
In an increasingly competitive market, retailers need to differentiate themselves through the
quality of the customer experience they deliver. However, this means knowing their customers
better and having the right information at their fingertips.
1. A Single view of the Customer
A single view of the customer represents an
evolution in the way businesses approach
customer engagement. In today’s competitive
retail environment, this consolidation of critical
data about customers becomes a competitive
differentiator as incomplete and inaccurate
customer information costs retailers in lost
opportunities.
Most large organizations spend significant
time building CRM systems, but only a few
achieve the elusive “single customer view”.
Attaining it, however, helps retailers analyze
and monitor individual customers at a
granular level, rather than in discrete channel
views. When this information is held in a
cross-channel CRM or data hub, this single
view can be utilized to develop powerful
one-to-one programs and highly personalized
one-to-one interactions that provides
individual value to your customers. This results
in increased customer lifecycle value,
satisfaction and loyalty.
In our work with fashion brands, we’ve
identified that aggregating customer data into
a single repository helps brands understand
the entire customer story; since data captured
in silos paints an incomplete picture and
becomes potentially misleading. Insights
derived from such a repository greatly
enhances a retailer’s ability to make better
decisions across different areas of the
business including marketing, merchandising,
store operations and customer service.
Rachel
6. How Brooks Brothers is Building its
Omni-channel World of Fashion
Leveraging SAP CRM and Customer Activity Repository (CAR)
6|
Case Study
The Brooks Brothers’ vision was to create a 360 degree view of the customer -
enabling the brand to know and respond to its customers in real-time with a highly
personalized approach. By implementing SAP CRM with SAP Customer Activity
as the master database, the brand was able to process large volumes of data from
multiple customer touch-points including in-store, phone orders and ecommerce to
gain a true omni-channel view of their customers.
View the Case Study
Customer
Call
Center
In-Store
CRM
eCommerce
7. | 7
The new consumer expects interactions to be real-time, highly personalized, and tailored to
buying preferences, transaction history, and user behaviors. Given the current state of retail,
data-driven insights must be operationalized and embedded in applications for an enterprise to
achieve a winning strategy.
2. Personalization
Through the consolidation of customer
interactions across a brand’s multiple
channels, fashion companies have a
tremendous opportunity to convert data into
valuable insights - and ultimately drive
exceptional personalization strategies. For all
the challenges it presents in execution,
deciphering this information holds great
impact to a retailer’s bottom line – arming
executives with insights crucial to making
better decisions regarding how best to
position or market their products to meet
individual customer needs.
Personalized Interactions =
Engaged, Active and Loyal Customers
Consumers are by nature curious, fickle and
transient in their interests and motivations,
which makes it difficult to create a
one-size-fits-all strategy. Personalization helps
retailers avoid the perils of broad assumptions
to tailor shopping experiences to individual
likes and current interests - allowing
consumers to shop more efficiently and even
learn about offers they might otherwise miss.
This helps retailers optimize and build a more
informative and productive shopping
experience in a way that attracts more traffic
to stores and websites.
Recentering the organization to create
consistently engaging experiences that go
well beyond a single campaign, channel or
experience snowballs into a positive customer
experience, which ultimately creates an
engaged consumer.
Over time, as consumers accumulate more
and more positive experiences with both
the product and the brand, the relationship
deepens – resulting in loyal customers and
advocates of the brand.
The higher the quality of a
company’s customer
experience, the more
customers who purchase again,
don’t switch to competitors,
and recommend the company.
- Forrester Research
7|
8. | 8
Activating the Consumer’s Journey to Steer Growth
Rachel’s Story
28, Lives in California, Single,
High Income, Fashion Focused,
Tech Savvy, Heavy Online
Shopper
Rachel’s Social
Media Profile
Frequency of
in-store visits in
the past month
Wish List Past Purchase
History
Identified as an
‘Elite Member’
Email sent out:
Free shipping on all
online-purchases
Personalized offer based on
information from customer
intelligence engine
40% discount on all
items on wishlist
within the next month
Rachel is happy, and
becomes a repeat
customer!
9. | 9
Most customers today deviate from a linear buying path, starting their shopping experience in
one channel (e.g., social or ecommerce site), researching products using mobile devices, then
visiting a store. But rather than a seamless experience that reflects the shopper’s history with
the retailer, customers often encounter an irritating loss of context and friction as they move
from one channel to another.
3. Real-time Contextual Insights
Personalization — recognition of the customer
individually, making suggestions about what
he or she might like — is a big factor in
deepening engagements.
However, it is the context and relevance that
creates the distinction in memorable customer
experiences. A real-time personalized
message, for example, might address a
shopper by name or suggest some new
assortments related to the user’s buying
patterns. Yet none of that is relevant if the
shopper is actively looking for summer
clothing at the time.
Context - the cumulative story that is derived
from data observations about customers –
gives meaning to data. There is a dramatic
and corresponding change in the use of
context as deep situational understanding can
help drive well-informed decisions.
Organizations can derive trends, patterns, and
relationships from unstructured and related
structured data to discover new opportunities.
Taking such an approach will allow retailers to
focus their resources on data collection and
analysis and concentrate efforts on engaging
consumers with the right messages at the
right times.
In today’s retail environment, such situational
awareness is essential in creating a better
customer experience as retailers are able to
increase the value to the consumer
throughout the shopping journey.
• Real-time listening across
multichannel touch points
• Flexible data collection that
accommodates new information
gleaned from constantly changing
customer behavior
• Intuitive, visual representation of
data for easy analysis
• Dynamic modification to campaigns
based on the flow of consumer
activity throughout customers’
unique buying journeys
Contextual engagement requires:
9|
10. | 10
Contextual Engagement in Action
10|
A customer browses a
retailer’s site and adds
items to her wishlist.
COUPON
New Arrival
Two days later, she
walks into the retailer’s
store.
The associate identifies the
customer and pulls up her profile
on a clienteling app.
The associate sees that the
customer recently added a pair of
shoes to her wishlist. The same pair
of shoes is currently in stock and is
available in her size.
A personalized offer is generated -
offering 25% off on the pair of
shoes.
Wish List
11. | 11
Today’s tech-savvy customers are actively comparing prices in-store, online and on the go. Armed
with multiple devices and constantly on the lookout for the best deal, they are increasingly price
aware, price sensitive and even price influencers. To compete, retailers must offer the right price at
the right time - which requires unlocking customer data often trapped in siloed enterprise systems.
4. Customer-centric Pricing
A personalized pricing strategy uses
automation to help retailers increase their
price responsiveness to react more swiftly to
supply and demand, consumer behaviors and
other market shifts in near real time.
This approach can take into account complex
variables such time of day, demand, price
elasticity, competitor prices and more.
Coupling all this information with the data
trails generated by online consumers helps
retailers ‘size up’ each customer to set
different prices for different customers. Based
on such data, it’s possible for retailers to
predict what products a consumer is
interested in buying, when they are likely to
buy them and, critically, the price they would
be willing to pay.
Take Rachel for example. She is a regular
shopper - having made over 6 visits to the
store over the past 3 months and purchased
more than15 items. By extracting data from
purchases she’s made in-store and on-line,
and identifying the frequency of trips she’s
made to the store on a monthly basis, the
retailer categorizes her as an elite member.
The next time she shops, the retailer employs
a pull based strategy to generate a
personalized price. Since Rachel is identified
as a loyal customer, the probability of her
receiving a better price in comparison to
another customer is higher.
But that’s just a small sample of the many
variables retailers use to set prices. The words
entered into a search engine in particular has
a huge influence. For e.g., if a retailer knows a
consumer searched for “size 6 women’s
shoes,” the retailer can target that consumer
with a $10 discount or go upto 20% if the
consumer registers as a member.
Using a behavioral-based platform that takes
into consideration the Customer Journey,
Social Data, Past Purchase History and
Inventory Availability, fashion brands are able
to adapt to market dynamics and develop
more compelling offers and pricing to increase
sales. This leads to an increase in customer
lifetime value, boost in customer conversion
& retention rates, which in turn increases
revenue.
12. | 12
As consumers continuously generate real-time data through social channels, the
instantaneous and public nature of social data gives businesses an opportunity to
create equally fast-moving strategies to exceed customer expectations.
5. Sentiment Analysis
The digital universe will grow, as will the
ability to interpret what is today seemingly
uninterpretable. In doing so, Social Analytics -
monitoring and interpreting customer
sentiment and activity - has become a
powerful tool; not just for building stronger
relationships with customers, but also as a
compelling way of deciphering data to predict
future trends. As consumers increasingly rely
on social media, data collected will feed into
powerful algorithmic tools that, over time, will
monitor and learn consumers’ response to
defined situations and offers.
These insights enable retailers to develop a
more comprehensive view of a customer
and meet perpetually shifting consumer
demands more effectively. Preferences
around a particular product can be easily
matched to social data to answer questions
like “What do females in the 20-30 age
group think of product x?” and “How did the
response change after the launch of our new
video campaign?”
Given that this data is public, fashion retailers
are now in a better position to segment
consumer types, which in turn can be
leveraged to customize store layouts and
assortments for specific regions. Similarly,
manufacturers can harness open data in the
form of social media chatter or “likes” to
improve after-sale interactions with
consumers and make informed product
design and development decisions.
Value of Sentiment Analysis
Heightened knowledge: Fast and accurate
insight to optimize marketing campaigns,
enhance customer relationships, build brand
advocacy and amplify loyalty.
Anticipate and influence behavior: Pinpoint
trends in the collective behavior of consumers
in a particular region
Predict business outcomes: Reduce the
guesswork and make informed decisions
based on tangible data to evaluate the best
return across customer service, and sales
and marketing.
13. | 13
The Business Impact of Consumer Intimacy
1
Parature - INFORGRAPHIC: The Financial Impact of Customer Service
2
Rosetta - Customer Engagement from the Consumers Perspective
3
Walker - Customers 2020: The Future of B2B Customer Experience
4
McKinsey - The Moment of Truth in Customer Service
5
Forrester Research - Customer Experience Index
$83 estimated loss due
to poor customer
service in US1
Billion
Highly engaged consumers2
:
buy 90% more frequently
spend 60% more in each transaction
5x more likely to choose brand for future purchase
improvement in a company's customer experience
can translate into more than $1 billion in increased
revenue and other benefits.1
increase in total stock returns was enjoyed by
Customer Experience Leaders over the last 5 years
vs. 34% loss for Customer Experience Laggards.5
of consumers are willing to spend an average of
13% more with companies that provide excellent
customer service.1
of U.S consumers would try a new brand for a
better service experience.1
10%
43%
70%
59%
By 2020, customer experience
will overtake price and product
as the key brand differentiator3
of buying experiences are
based on how the customer
feels they are being treated470%
14. | 14
At attune, we work
exclusively with Fashion
& Lifestyle companies; helping
brands deliver superior
customer experiences in
the digital age.
Real-time Consumer and Retail Analytics
Utilizing technologies such as SAP Customer
Activity Repository (powered by SAP HANA®
),
we help fashion brands gain a 360O
view of
their customers and a real-time view of
inventory across all channels.
Consumer Engagement
Leveraging predictive, contextual insights, we
help fashion retail companies deliver a
personalized shopping experience to its
customers through a suite of clienteling
solutions.
Omni-channel Fashion
Through a vertically integrated operational
platform such as SAP Fashion Management,
we help fashion companies deliver a superior,
consistent customer experience across multiple
channels.
How attune Can Help Fashion Brands Drive Consumer Intimacy
Schedule an Assessment
15. | 15
Conclusion
The rise of omni-channel has permanently
altered the course of customer relationships
and placed a renewed focus on the customer
experience. This emphasis has grown to the
point where it practically overshadows the
products themselves.
Amidst this painful reality of highly disruptive
trends, competition from online pure plays,
pressure from shrinking margins, and eroding
customer loyalty severely underscores a
retailer’s ability to compete - leaving
traditional approaches obsolete.
Fortunately, today’s technologies, processes
and customer engagement tools have all
advanced, contributing to the evolution of
customer-intimate business strategies.
Brands that set themselves apart with the
aim of building real relationships by
committing to customer-centric principles will
be better equipped to expand their market
share and see their bottom line soar.
In our experience with global fashion brands,
we believe retailers need to look at the
customer more holistically — across all
interactions and across the purchase cycle —
to better shape the customer journey and
drive brand loyalty.
It all lies in retailers getting past the idea of
simply servicing customers and instead, start
focussing their efforts on getting closer to
customers by creating the experiences that
they want.
1. Drive improvements along the
entire value chain by acting on
customer insight
2. Acquire and nurture new customers
by uncovering customer attitudes
and behaviors
3. Deepen customer relationships
based on a better understanding of
interests
4. Improve customer lifecycle with an
accurate retention strategy
5. Improve decision making across
merchandising and product
placement, by delivering products
customers want
Consumer Intimacy Helps:
