Although we may not be flying around in rocket ships quite yet, retail today is about as futuristic as anyone could have imagined. It’s hard to envision a world without the 24/7 on-demand access to the endless aisles of ecommerce retail. Personalization has played a huge role in, not only the success of companies like Amazon, but the advancements in ecommerce and retail as a whole. Personalization has enabled retailers to create digital channels that feel as intimate and customer-oriented as a physical store; so over time consumers feel recognized as unique individuals in their shopping journeys.
So what is next in the world of retail personalization?
In an effort to identify the top of mind personalization trends for retailers and brands in 2016, RichRelevance reviewed the requests for proposals (RFPs) from 2015. The retailer RFPs reviewed were largely represented by Internet Retailer’s Top 100 in North America and were retailers who made over $75 billion in aggregated revenue.
Overall, we can see how retailers are uniting the consumer experience. Over the next year, retailers will leverage personalization to bring together all digital and physical channels – to create true omnichannel customer experiences based on three key trends.
Trend 1: Completing Personalization
Retailers today are laser focused on enhancing shopper experiences by using data that is readily available across channels. With every additional touch point and channel, retailers have been granted the gift of data. Until now little has been done to leverage the information retailers have gathered and most of the data has not been synthesized to create an omnichannel experience. To fully implement personalization retailers require a powerful personalization platform to ingest retail data from feeds such as smartphones, tablets, point-of-sale systems, inventory and contact centers. The more data points a retailer collects and integrates, the more seamless a customer experience becomes across channels.
For example, consider how things might be merchandised in stores versus how they’re displayed online – what departments are physically next to each other or across the aisle, and how leveraging purchase data from the store could positively impact online engagement and sales.
Integrating personalization from third party vendors and channels also plays a crucial role in unifying all the elements of the consumer’s physical and digital world. By influencing personalization with geographic, demographic, weather and loyalty components adds an incremental layer of sophistication and relevance.
Trend 2: Enabling Smarter Associates
Tying directly into Trend 1, leads us to the next trend of enabling smarter associates. Today’s retailer wants to enable customer-facing personnel with digital technologies to help associates deliver in real time the highest level of customer service possible. By using a personalization platform that synthesizes human intelligence with artificial intelligence the retail associate can leverage all cross channel customer data, product details and content at every interaction.
One of the biggest challenges in retail is bringing together all shopping channels to deliver a seamless customer experience. An ideal experience has no friction, so that when a consumer walks into a store or calls the contact center, the retail representative already knows everything that customer has looked at, purchased and even returned over the years. To solve this problem of eliminating friction to consumers, retailers are launching a variety of associate-facing applications for use in stores and even contact centers. These applications recall all previous and current customer behaviors/purchases in real time so that an associate can offer a level of customer service that is complementary to the individual’s history, tastes and preferences.
Enabling smarter associates will also play a big role in personalizing contact or call centers. By leveraging different types of clienteling applications, agents will no longer need to spend time determining who a shopper is or what they want. The application will give the agent a real-time view into recent browsing history and purchases across channels to offer a relevant response right from the start.
Trend 3: Launching Tech Savvy Stores
In an effort to combat the strong footprint that the Amazon and other pure play ecommerce retailers have acquired over the last decade, multichannel retailers are bringing technology to the storefront. Retailers are creating unique and innovative shopping experiences to tend to the zero-friction shopping needs of the modern consumer.
A great example of in-store innovation includes the Intelligent Fitting Rooms that leverage RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags to recognize clothing that is brought into the fitting room. By integrating this technology in the fitting room, retailers can help shoppers find alternate sizes and offer intelligent recommendations to suggest alternatives or assist in completing a look.
In summary, this is the year of a unified customer experience placing great focus on cross-channel shoppers, anticipating their needs and catering to them with services that previously didn’t exist. The three trends of completing personalization, enabling smarter associates and launching tech savvy stores create an sophisticated and seamless omnichannel experience for the shopper, and ultimately allow personalization technologies to influence even more of the consumer experience than ever before.
For more 2016 insights visit us at our RelevanceTV YouTube channel.
Comprehensive product intelligence enhances cross-sell and upsell with personalized merchandising strategies based on product attributes and compatibility
RichRelevance®, the global leader in omnichannel personalization, and CNET Content Solutions (CCS), the leading provider of ecommerce product content, data and solutions, have renewed their strategic partnership to enhance cross-sell and upsell for retailers.
The partnership enhances the independent Relevance Cloud™ personalization platform with CCS’s DataSource™ product, the industry’s most comprehensive database of consumer electronics product information on more than 10 million SKUs, to allow merchants to curate a personalized shopping experience that includes the most relevant complementary products and accessories to consider at the time of purchase. Now retailers using the Relevance Cloud can inspire consumer purchase with perfectly matched products – while eliminating manual product mapping and the cost and effort of keeping up to date with inventory and trends.
Advanced Merchandising with the Relevance Cloud
With DataSource, the Relevance Cloud algorithms optimize cross-sell and upsell by accessing timely, accurate and consistent information on 10 million Consumer Electronics product SKUs in 32 markets and 23 languages. These Advanced Merchandising capabilities provide a supplemental layer of product intelligence to RichRelevance’s personalized product recommendation solution, Recommend™, enhancing real-time behavioral recommendations with attribute and compatibility-based capabilities.
Product attributes such as brand, style, dimensions, compatibility, technical specifications, pre-installed software, and manufacturer warranty information are among the data that can be used to create new recommendation strategies for perfectly matched products. Using deep product profiles from DataSource™, the Relevance Cloud matches products by specific attributes such as key selling features, price points, and technical compatibilities, placing brand affinity directly at the merchant’s fingertips.
The Relevance Cloud’s wealth of data ensures that an appropriate variety of accessories (e.g., computer peripherals, or an outfit) are matched intelligently to the base product’s characteristics. It also surfaces compelling alternatives within retailer-specified parameters (for example, products with higher-grade feature sets priced within 20% of the base product). Merchants have full control to adjust rules to change or support brand affinity, product assortment, user experience and vendor partners; extend or override behavior-based rules; or create custom rules to be applied at any level (SKU, category, or catalog).
About CNET Content Solutions’ DataSource™
Since 1999, thousands of companies have turned to DataSource for the standardized product data to power their online websites and helps convert shoppers into buyers. With product coverage in 32 markets and 23 languages, DataSource is a world-class leader in standardized product data. Some of the top retailers in the world use DataSource every day to manage their online product catalogs.
For Questions contact Renee Newby, BPR for RichRelevance
757.651.6554
Personalization is no longer an option in delivering innovative consumer experiences regardless of the retailer or channel of business. It’s a mandate to create a connective customer journey. This is why 5 of the top 8 apparel and luxury retailers in the US rely on RichRelevance to deliver state-of-the-art personalization.
Join us for this unique presentation and learn first-hand from the personalization experts from RichRelevance that are working directly with these Apparel & Luxury retailers to create innovative customer experiences through personalization.
Key Take-Aways:
- 10 strategic personalization techniques used by leading Apparel & Luxury retailers today
- What kind of data can transform the customer experience
- How retailers are connecting the dots of the customer journey across channels
The year of 2015 has been tremendous for RichRelevance and for the retail industry at large. While I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished as an organization, I’m even more excited about the success of our customers and the ways in which they are leveraging RichRelevance to traverse the omnichannel customer journey by building personalized experiences. Today, omnichannel initiatives are on everyone’s priority list, personalization is more important than ever, innovations in retail are starting to reap dividends and Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Information Officers are partnering ever more closely.
This past year was filled with many milestones for RichRelevance. We launched an entirely new Relevance Cloud Omnichannel Personalization Platform, powered hundreds of ecommerce websites, mobile apps, in-store and contact center experiences; and 77 major retail brands around the globe chose Relevance Cloud as their independent personalization platform. This is an addition to an esteemed list of 240 brands that already use Relevance Cloud.
We innovated by opening our core personalization platform, releasing new services like user profile service, strategy publishing service and more. We also launched Engage, a new product for content and promotion personalization. Many more customers extended RichRelevance to cover mobile devices, in addition to email, stores and even contact centers, with each of our omnichannel products.
Our research and development efforts have enabled us to become the provider of the only fully- featured, independent and open personalization platform in the market. This allows us to support all your omnichannel projects and any other innovative customer experience you may launch in the coming years.
This technical leadership has allowed us to secure the top spot as the leader in omnichannel personalization for the fifth year in a row according to Internet Retailer. We also launched our twelfth global datacenter in Tokyo, Japan bringing global latency under 100ms. Finally, we held our first customer conferences in Europe and North America.
Along with our customers, we’re on an incredible journey. Our vision is to enable any company to personalize all customer interactions. As referenced in the recent Digiday article, “How Barneys is digitizing its New York City flagship store,” we are helping retailers like Barneys to equip store associates with real-time customer data using best cloud and mobile personalization technologies.
And we’re helping some of the biggest retailers in the world, like Office Depot, build cloud-based experiences that are inherently personalized and seamless. Never before has Marketing and IT partnership had such an important role in the enterprise, and it’s a great honor for us to tie them together and be a part of that transformation for our customers.
The year 2015 was also transformational for the RichRelevance ecosystem. We deepened our partnerships with world’s best technology and services providers such as Accenture, HookLogic, StarMount and several others to enable a best-of-breed personalization technology stack.
As we march down 2016, I wanted to take a minute to thank you for your partnership and your support. Thank you for being an inspiring community of forward-thinking, innovation-driven, consumer-first, omnichannel-loving retailers. Let’s keep doing great things together.
Best wishes for a successful 2016!
– Eduardo Sanchez
Personalization is no longer an option in delivering innovative consumer experiences regardless of the retailer or channel of business. It’s a mandate to create a connective customer journey. This is why 4 of the top 8 consumer electronics retailers in the US rely on RichRelevance to deliver state-of-the-art personalization.
Join us for this unique presentation and learn first-hand from the personalization experts from RichRelevance that are working directly with these CE retailers to create innovative customer experiences through personalization.
Key Take-Aways:
- 10 strategic personalization techniques used by leading CE retailers today
- What kind of data can transform the customer experience
- How retailers are connecting the dots of the customer journey across channels
Featuring Gartner and L’Oreal Paris