Mobile - Omnichannel - Personalization | May 23, 2016

Omnichannel Personalization Means Mobile First, and This Time We Mean It!

Can a better user experience disrupt an industry? I don’t mean digital-only experiences like Angry Birds or FarmVille, but industries with physical assets and high marginal costs like taxis and 200,000 square foot stores. Uber and Amazon are proving that user experience disrupts. Amazon accounted for 24% of all U.S. retail growth last year and taxi license values have dropped 28% since Uber launched. Increasingly, our clients are telling us that their customers compare their user experience’s to that of Uber and Amazon — not Kohl’s to Target, Nordstrom to Saks, Williams Sonoma to Crate & Barrel, or Sam’s Club to Costco. Today, your competition, especially in user experience, has no bounds. Vertical silos no longer apply, you’re competing against whomever has created the most innovative and user-centric experience.

Google predicted this six years ago and has consistently repeated the warning ever since, however, few retailers responded. It’s difficult to head this kind of warning when ecommerce is growing at 30% year-over-year and there’s no pain in sight, but this year the pain arrived. So what can retailers do?

One of our luxe department store clients conducted a study a year ago to determine what their clients wanted in their user experience. They were considering everything from pop-up stores, in-home trunk shows to tablet apps. The response was oddly simple and overwhelmingly clear: whatever you do make sure it works on the shopper’s 5 inch smartphone screen and equip in-store sales associate’s with tablets rich with useful information. They were a bit surprised. Women standing in a gorgeous multi-story luxury department store would want rich, personalized information on their 5” screen? Overwhelmingly, yes. And when she was talking face-to-face with a high-paid, well-trained sales associate she wanted the associate to have the same personalized information so they could share it on an 8” screen? Yes again!

Like most mega-trends, it’s not surprising in retrospect. After all this is the generation that publishes their lives across social media, invented the selfie, and stares at their beloved 5” screen every chance they get. Although we’ve heard it time and time again, we’ve now been told that mobile dominates, plain and simple.

So with mobile applications in mind, here are the low-hanging fruit we’re seeing our retail clients go after:

Offline sales: Add store and contact center sales transactions to your web and mobile app customer profiles. Transactional data is relatively small. It only takes four minutes to upload Cyber Monday sales for a huge retailer such as Macy’s.

In-store mode for customers’ mobile app: Stores are information rich environments, but so are smartphone apps, so get them working together. JCPenney, L.L.Bean, Patagonia and many others are doing just this. Start with something as simple as letting customers scan an item’s barcode and retrieve real time prices, inventory, accessory recommendations, other product recommendations and even editorial content. Standing in front of a 4 foot hunk of plastic is useful, but so is watching an awesome video on how to use it; feeling the fabric of a dress is experiential, but so is seeing how it was fitted and flowed on the runway. If your customers like scanning items then add more proactive service features such as passively detecting location with beacons and then streaming personalized recommendations and content as they move about the store.

Sales associate app: Monsoon was our first client to add personalization to sales associate tablets. After extensive testing, they rolled it out to 325 stores, saw a 130% increase in average order value for customers served with the app compared to customers who were not. Customers loved the app, 84% of customers gave it an excellent rating and they purchased 1.3x more merchandise. Since then Barneys New York, Ann Taylor and others have rolled out similar sales associate apps.

In-store browse abandonment emails: If 80% of a retailer’s sales are in-store and only 25% of store customers use the apps described above, then that will generate as much customer-level data as their website, doubling the behavioral info available for driving personalization. One obvious and high ROI use case is browse abandonment (retargeting) emails following store visits that did not result in a sale.

There are a myriad of ways to create impactful customer experiences across channels, and if it hasn’t become evident, now is the time. There is no one size fits all for omnichannel personalization, after all that would be counter intuitive. If you’re interested in learning more watch my webinar on How to Utilize Your Customer Experience to Disrupt your Market or feel free to reach out to me at DBryan at RichRelevance.com to start sketching a personalization roadmap that best represents your brand, channels, tech stack, budget, and ROI goals.

Customers - Hill Climbing - Personalization - Recommendations | May 16, 2016

Leading Marketplace gives RichRelevance Top Review

I wanted to highlight a particularly interesting case study of RichRelevance customer, PriceMinster. The second most visited ecommerce site and leading marketplace in France, PriceMinister, part of the Rakuten Group, was looking for a personalisation platform to help improve their commercial performance and give them a competitive edge.

PriceMinister turned to RichRelevance in 2012 because they needed a scalable and robust personalisation engine to cope with one of the broadest product catalogues (up to 200 million products) and 15 million visitors per month to their website.

After A/B tests showed a much greater engagement of visitors with the RichRelevance personalised recommendations verses their incumbent provider, plus a 1.5% revenue lift, PriceMinister implemented the RichRelevance Recommend™ solution.

Wanting to ensure they were practicing as much personalisation as possible, PriceMinister went on to utilise the help of one of the RichRelevance personalisation consultants to run optimisation tests in order to further improve performance. As a result they’ve maximised the amount of personalisation opportunities that can occur across their various customer touchpoints (web, email, mobile, etc.).

To find out how PriceMinister got on with their optimisation project and for more results, download the full case study.

Content Personalization - Customer Engagement - Omnichannel - Personalization | May 10, 2016

Beacons, Not Useless After All

The usage of proximity-based beacons seems to have floundered since they were introduced in 2013. After reading this very interesting article about the Regent Street App, it is obvious why. Unfortunately, many retailers, and even some tech companies, think of beacons as just a tool to trigger push notifications. From this perspective it is understandable why many would assume that beacons do more damage than good; using beacons to trigger endless location-based notifications would equate to a type of spam, resulting in an irritated customer.

In truth, beacons are way more than a vehicle for push notifications if you understand how to use them correctly. Here’s why:

Beacons are dumb, technically speaking. The only thing they do is broadcast a specific string. For example, the beacon might broadcast its name and location, such as number 123. That’s all. It’s up to the application and infrastructure behind the beacon to make any sense of it. Essentially, beacons are passive and can be used to deliver whatever string it is programmed to.

Ok, so now you’re thinking: what does that mean and how should retailers use them?

Here’s some food for beacon-thought. Please note that this is by no means a comprehensive list of beacon applications. However, if you are using a sophisticated personalization platform, these should all be relatively simple to deploy:

Store Identifier
Suppose you only have one beacon in a chain of stores and an app that can pick up the signal. What can you do with it? First you can provide the beacon with the name of your store, for example: “New York, 5th Avenue”. Once the shopper enters the store and the app picks up the beacon, you can write this event in a centralized user profile so that you know that specific shopper entered that specific store. Based on this information, you can then determine the frequency the shopper comes into your store(s). If you find the shopper frequents one store more often than others, you can determine this is his/her preferred store. Once you know his preferred store, you can send him promotions and offers from that specific store and always make sure you show the inventory of products at that location.

Department Locator
If you place beacons around the store in departments such as shoes, coats and perfumes. When the shopper opens up the app in the store, the app picks up the the signal of the beacon; the beacon will know where the shopper is specifically in the store and will display the appropriate and relevant content. When the app is opened in the shoes department, it will show content for shoes. When it’s in the perfumes section, it will show content for perfumes – you get the idea. The information about which department has been visited can be stored in the centralized user profile, so that when the user logs onto his/her mobile device or home computer, he or she is greeted with relevant content.

Re-Engagement Trigger
Given that the beacon has learned and retained all of this information in the centralized user profile, a retailer can leverage these learning and behaviors to intelligently re-engage and welcome the shopper when he/she returns to the store. With every trigger, previous behaviors can be recalled to facilitate a curated conversation and a customer experience that learns and adapts with the customer.

Connecting the Dots
Another valuable type of information is offline purchase data, which can be ingested into the centralized user profile through the means of a loyalty card program or e-receipts. When you find that a shopper visited the fragrance department and viewed various fragrances on his/her mobile while navigating the store, but ultimately didn’t purchase a fragrance, you can re-engage with him/her by triggering personalized email with content from this section and products he/she looked at.

The retail landscape demands that the customer experience becomes simpler, more intuitive and more personal than ever before. And today, every shopper navigates the aisles and departments of his or her preferred retailers with mobile devices in hand; beacons help connect the customer journey, bringing the digital and physical worlds together for a harmonious experience.

Hack Week | April 28, 2016

The Hacks are Back! Winners of 2016.1 Hack Week

In keeping with tradition, RichRelevance hosted its 5th Annual Hack Week last week uniting the best and the brightest within our Science, Operations and Engineering Organizations.  Working together, the teams developed some of the most innovative products and product enhancements we’ve ever seen in RichRelevance history.

In the spirit of free thinking, {rr} Hack Week is governed by few rules and little direction, to give way to big ideas and unique problem solving approaches. That said, a little inspiration is always needed, so before unleashing their inner creativity and digging into their projects we offered the team some simple suggestions:

  • Feel free to choose something that interests you and that is relevant to our customers

  • You are encouraged to collaborate with other teams within the company – some great ideas and skillsets can be found outside of Engineering

  • Most importantly, have fun

Our 5th Annual Hack Week kicked off on Friday, April 8th with 16 projects in development.  The week culminated in a 2 1/2 hour demo-thon last Friday, and I was amazed by the innovative and diverse projects showcased.  The presentations included production quality demos, great insight into current data trends, extremely useful dev/ops/QA tools, as well as new approaches to pattern recognition that would make any geek swoon.

Our esteemed judges reviewed each presentation and awarded prizes to the following projects best on five categories: Unsung Hero, Geekiest, Raving Fan, Fan Favorite, Best in Show.

And the winners were, [drum roll please]…

Unsung Hero: Not flashy but makes a difference

Team Project Name:

“Parquet data format with prestoDB and data visualization”

100 Foot Overview:

Converted raw logs into a new queryable format, enabling space savings, incredible speeds, and data visualization.

 

Geekiest: Most algorithmic

Team Project Name:

“Fast CTR Prediction with FTRL”

100 Foot Overview:

Reimagined how we predict clicks, by creating an algorithm that decreases execution time to <1 minute, provides better accuracy, is memory efficient, and enables incremental data, it does it all!

 

Raving Fan: What will make customers jump for joy

Team Project Name:

“Weather based targeting and rules”

100 Foot Overview:

A fully new take on the infrastructure to pull in weather data, categorize it by type, geocode and build models that enable users to target content and rules by types of weather that is/will be occurring.

 

A Double Whammy! Winning 2 Awards:

Fan Favorite: Voted on by the masses

Best In Show: Overall the most impressive. This project checked all the boxes: impressive technology, great presentation, humor and something that our customers could really benefit from.

Team Project Name:

“Deep learning technology for new rec strategies”

100 Foot Overview:

Here the team did something really interesting – leveraging some of our existing deep learning technology to produce some new and interesting recommendation strategies (we’re keeping top secret for now :))

A big congratulations to the winners and to everyone to participated! This year we had some of the best submissions in RichRelevance Hack Week history.  All projects were super ambitious and visionary for our company and products. We are looking forward to incorporating these ideas into our future product roadmap. For more geeky fun, stay tuned for updates from the {rr} 2016.2 Hack Week happening later this year.

 

Customers - eCommerce Trends - Events - France - Omnichannel - Personalization | April 8, 2016

Making Connections in Monaco

Recently we participated in the event E-Commerce One to One in Monaco. In its sixth year, it yet again proved to be THE event for ecommerce leaders.  With over 1,000 carefully selected participants, the three-day event made for a rich exchange of ideas and innovations.

Some of the key topics discussed ranged from the shopping experience on mobile devices and developing a ‘mobile first strategy’ to customer service excellence and loyalty programmes. A survey of retailers attending the event uncovered the following top six investment priorities for retailers in 2016:

  • Creating excellence in customer service
  • Enhancing the shopping experience for mobile
  • Building customer-centric financial indicators
  • Developing a mobile first strategy
  • Building innovations for loyalty programmes
  • Developing branded content

For RichRelevance, E-Commerce One to One represented an opportunity not just to make new acquaintances, but also to meet and network with existing customers through dinners and receptions. The speaking sessions also featured one of our valued customers —children’s apparel retailer, Petit Bateau — who presented a workshop about their omnichannel journey with us.

In her workshop, CRM & Digital Director, Christel Hennion talked about the challenges faced by Petit Bateau and why they needed an omnichannel approach. With nearly half (44%) of their customers first searching online before visiting a store, Petit Bateau needed to connect online and offline sales channels to better understand their customers so they could make the right omnichannel recommendation.

To do this, Petit Bateau leverages RichRelevance’s user profile service to gather and access the necessary information about their customer both online and offline. With this customer knowledge, Petit Bateau used RichRelevance product recommendations to personalize the relevant offer on each channel for their shoppers. As a result, they have seen increased engagement and frequency of purchase from their customers.

Petit Bateau also shared an interesting cohort analysis. Even though a small percentage of shoppers interact with product recommendations, this segment represents 50% of orders and 60% of global turnover.

This segment leverages personalization as a means of navigation and catalogue discovery. They are often strongly committed and provide high value to the retailer.

See the E-Commerce One to One blog post for more on Christel’s talk.

Similarly, Google presented a separate workshop where they further expanded on the topic of analysing the influence of online and offline sales, again using Petit Bateau as the example. Laureline Serieys, Retail Industry Head at Google, discussed how they helped Petit Bateau map their customer journey and measure the influence of online and offline purchases. Read more on this session here.

Thanks to all those we met at E-Commerce One to One! The stellar group made it such an insightful event to attend.  We’re looking forward to 2017 already.

Customers - Events | March 28, 2016

Building Success Together: Summary of the 2016 EMEA Customer Advisory Summit

Recently key leaders in omnichannel personalisation attended our EMEA Customer Advisory Summit in the United Kingdom. We were delighted to welcome customers from France, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and the United Kingdom to the only European forum dedicated exclusively to omnichannel retail personalisation.

In its fifth year, the objective for this event, as always, was to help furnish retail and marketing leaders with the strategies and tools to build superior customer experiences. In addition to the RichRelevance leadership presenting, I’m so pleased to share that our EMEA Summit featured a stellar roster of thought leaders and world-class brands; and I wanted to share my insights related to this exciting event.

The EMEA summit featured keynote speaker Spencer Izard, Head of European Insights at IDC. Spencer spoke about differentiating through retail, which provided our retailers with further tools and information on how to use personalisation to innovate and transform their customer experiences.

Additionally, well-known and influential retailers gave presentations about their successes using RichRelevance as their omnichannel personalisation partner.

  • Marks & Spencer discussed why they chose RichRelevance Recommend™ and how RichRelevance helped them with a platform refresh. In addition, M&S provided insights about how they leveraged Client Excellence to drive sales, conversion and overall value.
  • French retailer, Petit Bateau, talked about how they have successfully leveraged RichRelevance across their multiple websites, through email, mobile and offline. They also spoke about how they have started to build their own strategies to segment audiences and make more predictive recommendations to their customers.
  • Shop Direct discussed how the UK’s second largest pure play retailer found RichRelevance to be the best tool to help them personalise their customer’s shopping experience and fulfill their company purpose to “Make good things easily accessible for more people.”
  • Saks Fifth Avenue presented the US retailer’s omnichannel strategy and showcased how Saks elevates the customer experience through leveraging Recommend. 

The event was supported by our partners Accenture, Hooklogic, Eagle Eye and Content Square all of whom contributed to the lively exchange of ideas, insights and learnings around improving customer experiences.

Omnichannel personalisation is a top strategic priority for retailers because the customer experience has now become the new battleground for retailers. The resources at the event helped our clients learn how to best use the Relevance Cloud personalisation platform to elevate the customer experience in real time, at every touchpoint, and compete based on a unique view of what is possible from their brand.

Mattieu Chouard speaking to CAS participants

Matthieu Chouard speaking to CAS participants

Alex McCracken, Marks & Spencer

Alex McCracken, Marks & Spencer

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