Listening carefully to our local retail marketing friends, we clearly heard and understood, as they shared their challenges surrounding the consolidation or their customer’s interactions, and how they would like to enhance their Customer’s Experience across all of their touch-points.

Across the board, retail marketers know that CX is absolutely key when it comes to solidifying customer engagement and ultimately, building a financially healthy and long term relationship between retailers and their customers. Great CX can make the difference you’re looking for and drive the outcomes your organisation’s demands.

We introduced our, UnifiedCustomer solution recently, together with our tech partners RedPoint Global.  Vin DelGuercio, RedPoint’s esteemed Solutions Director, co-presented a webinar that introduced UnifiedCustomer to our local market, and delved into how our new solution can Drive Big Outcomes while Removing the Roadblocks for Retail Marketers. To hear all about it from the man himself, please check out the following snippet from our webinar, where Vin plays a starring role and clarifies why UnifiedCustomer could be the perfect solution for you and your organisation, right here in our APAC region. 

Observant retailers around the globe realise that Customer Experience is the final frontier for them to differentiate themselves from their competitors. We all know that customers are mighty hard (and expensive) to acquire and keeping them coming back to purchase again over time is an art form in itself. Let’s be frank, customer’s expectations and demands from their relationships with retailers are often much higher than their retailer can deliver.  Just like Violet Beauregarde from Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, customers want their Oompa Loompa, and they want it now! Quite simply, customers will be lost if they’re not getting the experience that they expect, and will be heading to the competitor next door, or clicking on the next option in their Google search before you have a chance to diffuse their gripe and entice them back… 

We have spoken with a number of retailers in our local market, trying to determine what capabilities they would love to see in solutions that will help them achieve their Customer Experience goals. Based on the feedback they shared with us, it seems that they definitely know what they want, and the ideal solution they’d like sounds very similar to an enterprise Customer Data Platform (CDP) solution. But in reality, the size of our local population and the proportionate size of our retailers, the enterprise size solutions are just too far out of reach. They retailers we spoke to all shared a number of common blockers that are preventing them from implementing a solution. From restrictive large set up and licensing costs, to drawn out implementation times. We’ve heard you loud and clear and we believe that we now have an option! 

Our team at Marketsoft have taken all the feedback received, and we’ve combined that with our 30 years of data services experience in our local market. We called on our close partners at RedPoint Global, and together, we believe that we’ve developed an ideal CDP solution option for our local retailers. Powered by RedPoint, supported and managed by Marketsoft in Australia, together we’ve built a solution specifically for our local retail marketers, while removing most of the blockers! We’ve named this solution, UnifiedCustomer, and we’re excited to launch it into market and we’re ready to meet with you to explore what’s under the bonnet, and how your business could benefit by adding it to your tool kit.

Working closely within the local retail sector, we’ve observed numerous pain points being experienced by retailers over the past few years. Being a data services company, in our case, we’re listening out for and focusing on our retail friend’s data specific pain points. It’s interesting to note that it doesn’t matter where you look, data always seem to pop us as part of the cause, and as such, with some smart intervention, data can also be the solution!

Of course, this year has been out of the ordinary, to say the least, with the best-laid plans that had been signed off for 2020, now in tatters and businesses changing tack and heading into a direction that will keep them afloat (while tightly crossing fingers for luck!).

There has been a commonality to the pain points within our local retail sector, and even though they were already exponentially becoming more important over recent years, many of those pain points have been exacerbated in the past year due to the pandemic. This has forced many retail marketers to take action now, just to survive this tumultuous period and hopefully beyond. Action needs to be taken now, whether it was part of their original plan or not.

We’ve captured some of these challenges and observations that have been shared by our friends battling on the retail front line, as well as from our perspective looking in. We found that there were seven fairly common pain points that stood out and I’m happy to share them below. I wonder if any of these sound familiar to you?

1. A fairly obvious point, but worth locking in, is the fact that due to diminishing foot traffic, there’s been a decline in natural offline acquisition, hence now there’s increased pressure on search and media spend just to acquire customers.

2. Following on from this and given the high cost of acquisition, capitalisation through driving second purchase – conversion – has also become a major focus for most local retailers.

3. With offline transactions down, retailers are keen to replicate in-store experiences online, particularly as retailers drive in-store customers to digital.

4. The global regression in travel and tourist traffic is particularly effecting our premium and luxury retailers.

5. Conversion rates are in focus as every marketing dollar is scrutinised more than ever.

6. By necessity, traditional offline focused retailers are trying to navigate a new digital world, as Brands are being compared to competitors now more than ever; and

7. A point that we’ve heard loud and clear is that there’s a very strong dependency on data capture – both in-store and online – as the value of customer data is recognised in the mission of driving Customer Lifetime Value

Savvy retailers realise that Customer Experience is the final frontier for them to differentiate themselves, and we all know that customers will be lost if they’re not getting the experience that they expect.

We’re looking forward to speaking with you soon about any challenges that you’ve been experiencing and how we can help. We encourage you to browse around our webstite for more details or get in touch with me directly using the details below.