Tag Archives: real-time

Just Who Owns the Customer, Anyway?

February 7, 2013

by Jeanne Roué-Taylor

As technology expands rapidly to manage customer experience, a subtle shift is under way in who gathers and uses loyalty and other data to manage the customer relationship.

No one needs to remind us how quickly the nature of shopping and customer experience is changing. We see signs of it everywhere and need look no further than the startups, pattern of acquisitions and alignment of technologies reported in the tech press every day.

The big question

There’s a second shift happening that might not be quite as apparent as those news reports. It involves manufacturers creating ‘direct to consumer’ capabilities that open the door to the question, “Just who owns the customer?”

This is being driven partly by infrastructure spend by the biggest product companies that serve fashion, sports and fitness, grocery and every other major category. Technology now allows for personalized, one-to-one marketing relationships from the biggest manufacturers down to the individual consumer.

This side of e-commerce isn’t about the money, necessarily – that will remain mostly in the hands of the front-end of retail. It is more about additional touch points that build trust, relationships and communication that complement retailer activities.

Retailers playing catch up

This leaves the retailers needing to follow through on the brand-building investment of their suppliers. Many retailers are still slow off the blocks when it comes to customer-facing technology. That will need to change quickly to keep pace with rising customer expectations of convenient, in-the-moment offers and loyalty rewards.

Just who owns the customer will be decided based on who has the best system to manage the new model and set and meet those expectations.

Join us on February 12 for the webinar, The New Event-Driven Marketing: Success with Real-Time, Omni-Channel Engagement.

 

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Getting Real About Real-Time

January 10, 2013

By Jeanne Roué-Taylor

Real-time means something a little different to everyone. The term is too-often used to describe getting information on what happened up to the moment, a rolling report of the history of something – like customer purchases, staffing costs or inventory levels. It’s like asking what time it is. There’s only an accurate answer for that one-dimensional question at one moment, then time moves on.

But what if real-time can mean something much different? In the event-driven marketing realm, it does. We’re going through a transformation of the meaning of real-time driven by the increasing ability to know what’s happening simultaneously across a customer – their history, their location, our location, inventory, pricing, and more.

Hoping the needles move

Real-time’s new definition is about being able to anticipate the scenarios that move a customer to make a purchase, taking advantage of distributed inventory, rescuing an abandoned shopping cart and driving business to the web and store. It isn’t a dashboard to watch and hope the needles move. It is a way to anticipate and act in the actual moments that matter the most.

There’s a historical component to this kind of real-time, but it’s part of the context, not the answer.

But redefining the term isn’t enough. It has to be backed by event-driven marketing that connects all of those dots and provides a measurable advantage over the competition.

To learn more, download a copy of our whitepaper, “The New Event-Driven Marketing“.

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TIBCO Loyalty Lab 12.3 release enhances real-time offers and increases value and convenience for shoppers

December 12, 2012

We’re proud to announce an exciting update to our unified marketing platform that allows enhanced real-time offer targeting and qualification capabilities. In response to the feedback we’ve received for more precise and relevant targeting that helps marketers learn more about each customer while providing those customers a more relevant and convenient shopping experience, Loyalty Lab released 12.3, available to all existing and future clients.

Capabilities include:

  • Real-time API enhancements
  • Basket profiles and targeting
  • Brand targeting and qualification

We’ve worked to make implementation as simple as possible. Read on to learn more about each of these improvements.

Real-Time API Enhancements

Marketers can now ensure real-time processing of threshold point calculations and reward issuance, so customers can access benefits as soon as they are accrued. Transactions are sent in real-time from a store’s POS system to TIBCO Loyalty Lab Reward and evaluated. The POS system instantly receives a response with any points, rewards or certificates earned as a result of the transaction. The customer then receives a receipt with their current points balance and rewards earned, and can access their benefits right away ­­– online, in-store or via their mobile phones.

Basket Profiles and Targeting

This latest update also gives marketers greater control over which customer transactions qualify for a reward through pre-defined conditions.

Marketers can set up shopping basket profiles with conditions based on specific tender types used or minimum quantity of items purchased. For example, an offer can be created within the Loyalty Lab Reward platform which establishes that all members making three purchases of a specific brand with an AMEX card will be issued a $20 rebate.

This gives marketers more control over conditions based on the contents of customers’ baskets. Targeting can also require or exclude specific products or brands, in addition to product categories.

Brand Targeting & Qualification

Now, marketers can also more effectively target customers and qualify offers based on brand purchases, right down to individual products. We designed this enhancement to offer more granular targeting and extra control. Marketers can leverage this capability for cross-category selling, which is extremely useful for new product introductions.

For example, an established beauty brand has launched a new lipstick. They can create an offer that awards a coupon for 5% off the purchase of this lipstick, with the qualifier that customers must purchase any item in that brand family.

With these enhancements to the Loyalty Lab Reward platform, the possibilities are endless for marketers looking to extend relevant offers to their customers. Contact us to learn more.

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When the Big Event Isn’t a Sale

October 5, 2012

by Chris Taylor

We’re heading into Columbus Day Weekend in the U.S., giving us a great chance to look at the fundamental changes that technology is bringing to retail. The new game is event-based marketing.

Big Sale!

A quick look at the LA Times shows who’s in the old game. The pages are full of merchants using discounting as impersonal enticements to come out shopping. The merchants want to move overstocked merchandise, maybe, but more likely are hoping people will buy non-sale items while in the store.

But this isn’t an efficient model. The stores have to re-compete each time for the same customer using ever louder advertisements on the web, emails, print and broadcast media. This is a dead-end game and a broken process but the standard model for those who haven’t invested in loyalty programs. And as a recent article pointed out, loyalty programs are about much more than discounts.

Loyalty’s real purpose

Preceding event-based marketing was trigger-based marketing, and it would be worthwhile to look at what that means: Rather than choose a date like Columbus Day and discount of x%, trigger-based marketing involves really knowing and understanding the actual customer, not just their demographic group. Knowledge of the individual allows key events in the customer and business lifecycle to combine with measurable changes in customer behavior, ‘pulling the trigger’ on specific marketing activities.

Types of triggers include transactional (a purchase or question), recurring (birthdays and other life events), behavioral (initiating new accounts, changes in spending levels), and threshold (amount spent, limits exceeded). Each of these has implications for retention, up-sell and cross-sell that drive profitability.

These triggers are monitored in technology systems that continuously watch for predetermined patterns and enable delivery of marketing activities with the best timing and highest relevancy. Getting those two things right involves doing things, not after the ideal moment has passed. It means reacting to the customer when their actions and business conditions indicate, not before and not after.

But we can do even better.

Anywhere, everywhere

We’re in an omni-channel world…social, , mobile, web, physical location (0nline, in or near store) and already moving beyond trigger-based marketing to event-based. Real-time, mobile and event processing technology takes the trigger idea much further. For example, a customer visits a website, puts things in their shopping cart but then abandons it. If they are within a distance of a local store, they receive an offer delivered to their phone for the things left in the cart. As you can imagine, the response rates are much higher when the system works one-to-one and not one-to-many.

While these sophisticated systems have a cost, it involves up front investment that has recurring return, unlike the traditional advertising model. Where graphic art and a holiday once dominated, information flow, predictive analytics, cross-channel integration and process automation are the new tools of effective retail. Where we once shouted, we now understand, anticipate and act.

Find more by Chris Taylor at his blog, www.successfulworkplace.com and @successfulwork.

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Enabling Technologies for Customer Engagement, Conversion, and Retention

July 26, 2012

According to the Aberdeen report Customer Loyalty 2012: Enabling Technologies for Customer Engagement, Conversion, and Retention, the top strategic action identified by omni-channel Leaders (top 30% of performers*) is expanding their use of digital channels to deliver targeted and personalized offers to their customers. The two main channels identified by Leaders are mobile and social. For 2012:

  • 75% of Leaders are using or planning to use digital channels to deliver targeted and personalized offers.
  • Leaders are devoting a full quarter (25%) of their marketing budget to mobile and social initiatives.
  • Followers* are devoting 15% of their marketing budget to mobile and social initiatives.

The use of emerging channels (mobile, social) should be balanced by tried and true loyalty technology components (analytics, rewards), ideally in an integrated, omni-channel loyalty platform. Many retailers are still outsourcing the various components, which introduces complications of integrating data streams and technology. A centralized platform eliminates these risks by combining consumer insights, offer creation, offer redemption, and performance metrics reporting.

Leading Loyalty Technology Components
Leading Loyalty Technology Components

For retailers that are re-thinking, re-launching, or just entering the cross-channel loyalty space, the following are some of Aberdeen’s recommendations for success:

  • Implement a centralized cross-channel customer loyalty platform for easy access to all loyalty related data. Retailers who do so report a 20% increase in customer retention rates (compared to 8% for all others).
  • Ensure uniform data collection guidelines across channels for developing targeted loyalty offers based on customer information and affinities.

Use customer analytics for micro-segmentation of loyalty members for multi-tiered loyalty campaigns. Leaders are twice as likely to use analytics applications and reporting tools to track loyalty program redemption rates.

  • Incorporate mobile technology into loyalty programs to reach consumers on the go with targeted, personalized offers. Thirty-six percent (36%) of Leaders, compared to 9% of Followers, have a mobile loyalty platform of some form.
  • Use social media tools to engage customers in a two-way dialogue, and allow sharing of loyalty offers. These tools include social networks, blogs, product recommendations, user generated content, and microblogging.
  • Take advantage of customers’ desire for immediate gratification by delivering real-time rewards and utilizing location-based messaging. The real-time connectivity between brand and consumer is one of the top sources of ROI from social media marketing / loyalty.

To learn more about how leading organizations are using social media, customer analytics, mobile loyalty, real time rewards and location-based messaging to improve customer retention, frequency, and re-activation, Download the full report, Customer Loyalty 2012: Enabling Technologies for Customer Engagement, Conversion, and Retention.

*Aberdeen used three key performance criteria to distinguish Leaders (top 30% of performers) from Followers in the January 2012 Omni-Channel report: 1) Current Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), 2) Current on-time order delivery and 3) Year-over-year increase in revenue.

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The New Detail of Retail

July 20, 2012

by Chris Taylor – TIBCO

Retail has gone through enormous stresses in the past decade, with more to come. Just the normal ups and downs of local and global economies, supply chains and personal taste are a huge challenge. Add to that mix the increasing maturation of concepts like e-Commerce, Big Data, RFID and mobile.

Each of these would be a whopper to digest and together are changing the foundation of an ancient industry.

New ways to sell

Traditional in-store sales are combining with web, mobile and social. While the social channel may not be ‘here’, it is expected to become viable within a few years. This combination of channels can’t be managed as silos, as branding and look and feel need to be consistent for the customer (ie. mobile can’t just be dumbed-down Web) and for internal maintenance cost.

In the store or kiosk, Near Field Communication (contactless communication between devices) is the simple way to speed purchasing and is used extensively already at Starbucks in combination with their loyalty app.

How much does speed of checkout matter? Studies show it makes a huge difference. I know my wife and I choose ‘self-checkout’ even if it’s slower simply because we feel don’t like standing in a line, dependent on someone else. We only have ourselves to blame and that’s fine.

Selling needs to take place at the time, place and pace that a customer desires.

New forms of loyalty

It was always a great idea to attract a customer once and sell to them many times. Loyalty programs were a way to lower the cost of customer acquisition. Today, loyalty programs offer something even more meaningful…contextual information about the customer.

Not just what they buy, but when they shop, demographics, product preferences and more. If you think Safeway gives discounts because you’re a loyal customer, think again. There’s a transaction going on when you give information that is just as valuable for them as when you buy.

What do they do with that information? They create a context for commercial transaction that has several benefits:

  • Manages customer satisfaction more closely with direct (experience surveys, requests for feedback) and indirect (purchase patterns) measurements
  • Understands and confirms your loyalty patterns
  • Cross-sells and up-sells other products to increase revenue per transaction. This goal depends on getting the right offer to you in the right moment and through the proper channel to make your buying easy and natural/non-clumsy.

Click here to read more.

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You Had Me at, “Would You Like a Grande Latte?”

July 5, 2012

by Chris Taylor – TIBCO

My local Safeway isn’t what I would call a very modern store. And the employees are either high-school kids bagging groceries and collecting carts, or middle-aged cashiers, bakers and butchers. It was a big step forward a few years ago when I could sign for my credit card purchase on an electronic device. This morning, I had just finished my transaction when the store manager stepped up and said, “Mr. Taylor?” I nodded my head slowly as I didn’t think he knew my name. I was even more surprised when he said, “My system tells me you’re one of our best customers. Would you like a grande latte? I’d like to offer you a grande-sized drink of your choice at our Starbucks.”

I asked him how he knew. He pointed to his smartphone and said, “It’s a new thing we’re doing to show our appreciation.” Interesting… my low-tech local grocery store has taken a big step up in having the right data, in the right hands, at the right moment, and with the right context. I wasted no time getting my latte and left the store with a big smile on my face.

Personalization
But, I have a secret… we really like shopping at Trader Joe’s. We go to Safeway because it’s closer to my house and carries some things TJ’s doesn’t. Recently, we’ve begun gradually spending less at Safeway and more at the other store, probably something he didn’t know. The “personal” touch he showed, however, is more than we get elsewhere and provides something to think about before we take our business a few miles away.

Click here to read more.

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How to Give Sports Fans the Ultimate Mobile Experience

June 21, 2012

by the tibbr bogging team

Professional sports teams, from the 49ers to The Golden State Warriors, are releasing mobile apps for sports fans. Basic apps include player stats, game schedules and promotional offers. But, to build real fan loyalty, the apps need much more. What’s the secret to driving fan loyalty from a mobile app, the so-called second screen? 

Fan loyalty means building a community around the team, to make the fans feel like stakeholders. If they’re given a voice, that platform to make a connection, then that’s where their loyalty lays. The formula for fandom in a mobile world is creating a social layer, connecting fan to fan, fan to team, and team to fan. To really drive fan loyalty, mobile apps need to be social.

TIBCO just released the Golden State Warriors app. From a fan loyalty “give to get” perspective, it gives fans the usual news updates, player stats, a calendar of events, tweets and promotional offers. But, we’re adding the social layer as well. For example, fans can access a fan page with interactive polls where they can vote for the best player of the night. In return for “likes” and “dislikes,” the Warriors receive feedback and data from their fans to improve their experience.

But, the innovation doesn’t have to stop there.

What makes a traditional diehard fan continue to support the team, year after year, even after a long losing streak? The psychological principles driving fans to continue to follow a team include deep-rooted community-based rituals, fan bonding with the team and players, group affiliation or bonding with friends over the game, as well as the pure entertainment value.

With these principles in mind, let’s look at where we are now and where we could be in the future.

Click here to read more.

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Moving Beyond the Purchase

May 19, 2012

By David Rosen | Strategy, Analytics and Consumer Insights

CPG companies and other brands that sell through retailers desperately want to have a consumer relationship. We are lucky enough at Loyalty Lab to be working with two of the largest, best marketers in the world to help them forge those strategies. One of the keys to that coveted customer relationship is moving beyond purchase tracking to brand engagement. Traditionally some loyalty programs have utilized purchase tracking with in-pack codes, but this addresses a relatively small piece of the market because relatively few care enough to be willing to find a code and take the time to enter it in to their computer. It’s no longer reasonable to assume that this system is convenient for consumers.

And is purchase tracking the best system for marketers? How do you make sure someone is entering the codes that are theirs just once? What are the implications for the production lines – do marketers really want to invest in changes to those lines based on the data?

Today, technology-driven solutions can and will create better, more interactive consumer engagement experiences that generates actionable data faster than ever before for marketers. The use of mobile is a key way to enable this, whether it’s by snapping a picture or entering a code more conveniently into a device that’s closer at hand than a PC. Location based data can be tracked in real time and offers served in seconds. Social networks reward brand advocates who post, tweet and review.

These are all helping marketers identify shoppers who have been previously unidentifiable, deepen their relationships with them, and give them compelling reasons to purchase more.

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International Loyalty Trends – Mobile

March 29, 2012

By Michael Greenberg | Director, Marketing

I just returned from nine days in Australia and Asia. Based on conversations with a dozen companies and many individuals, it’s clear that mobile has become the medium of choice for customer interaction. Ensuring that consumers can interact with programs through a compelling smartphone app and SMS is imperative – classic PC interactions are now third in the minds of most consumers (after phones and tablets). Most see PCs as work tools and phones as personal tools.

While email and web interaction are still important, it’s undeniable that mobile is the device that everyone has access to, is always carrying around, and are using every day to manage their lives. Research a topic? Mobile Wikipedia. Social interactions? The usual suspects. Messaging? SMS and iMessage, Twitter and Facebook messages.

The rise of mobile is most apparent in Asia and other emerging markets, where it is often the only mechanism that people have to interact. “How does it work on mobile?” is no longer the question – everyone assumes mobile functionality. And it’s more than just enrollment, it’s offers, interactions, updates, communications, promotions – everything.

There’s so much more that you can offer customers when you enable the active participatory component that mobile offers – scan codes, check in, research, review, access local offers, you name it.

And when it comes to location-based marketing, since smartphone apps can report location automatically, any compelling smartphone apps that drives usage will enable compelling location marketing too.

We’ve all been talking about it for a while, and Asia may be ahead, but marketers must all consider challenge of how to move beyond push marketing and enable 2-way interaction in ways that keep up with customer expectations.


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