Keeping customers: challenges and most promising solutions

Retailers, both in-store and online, must remember that customer loyalty is more vital than ever. It is important to invest in a positive customer experience.

Shop owners and internet merchants need to turn shopping into game-playing experiences to meet ongoing changes in e-commerce, experts say.

Now buyers are more picky about what they spend their money on as many have reduced incomes, prices are rising. Retailers can no longer rely on personalization strategies alone to win over or retain loyal customers. According to Kerri Drozd, senior vice president for strategy at a customer experience company, in 2018  a customer’s name in communications, logged-in experiences, brand rewards programs  may have been a big value add for customers, but in 2022 every brand has these basics and to stand out, brands have to do differently.

To stay afloat, marketers should adopt recent trends in gamification, augmented reality (AR), and conversational artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This is a way to get more time with customers to build brand affinity and learn about them along the way.

Gamification is about using human motivation to change behavior, encouraging people to engage with a business in a new way that can ultimately create value for both customers and brands. Augmented reality helps connect the physical and digital dimensions allowing consumers to try their goods virtually before making a purchase. Conversational AI technologies enable next-level personalization to even unknown customers by using past customer profile data, behaviors, and lookalikes, Drozd explained.

Offering personalized experience is still very important.  Two-thirds of consumers expect companies to understand their individual expectations and needs. But what matters most to today’s consumer is meaningful, relevant interactions. That means knowing where, when, and how a consumer has historically and recently engaged with the brand and what their current intention is, that is contextualization.

Retailers are expecting decreased sales numbers for at least the rest of 2022. So holding onto existing relationships and engaging loyal customers is more important than ever. Understanding purchase occasions and context can help brands architect experiences that are fit-for-purpose. Offering more than rewards points and getting the right messages to consumers at the right place and the right time is key to break through the continually escalating noise in the marketplace,” suggests Drozd.

An approach retailers can take is to leverage their customer data using a customer data platform (CDP) to gain insights into changing preferences. These platforms surface critical insights that provide companies with trusted, relevant, and actionable data on how to engage with customers both offline and online. This equips businesses with powerful data to experiment with new engagement models, quickly pivot to new business models, deliver unique value to customers, strengthen loyalty, and meet business and financial goals.

By combining data from front-office and back-office sources, the option CDP provides, companies have access to holistic customer profiles. This provides a deeper customer understanding, actionable insights, predictive actions plus boosts revenue, increases customer conversion, retention and loyalty, expands growth while reducing the strain on IT resources.

CDP enables to deliver a true lifetime value score based on profitability, rather than simply purchase data. It also provides a means to prioritize segments based on customer profitability.