Helping Retailers to Adapt to a New Normal | Trigg Thoughts
Trigg thoughts: Helping retailers to adapt to a new normal

Top 5 challenges retailers are facing when adapting to the new normal

August 16th, 2021 Posted by Retail 0 thoughts on “Top 5 challenges retailers are facing when adapting to the new normal”

At Trigg Digital, we’re privileged to work across a diverse range of different business sectors.

In this new series of blogs, we’ll be sharing some of our ‘industry insights,’ calling out common challenges that we witness day in, day out, and we’ll show you some solutions that can help turn things around.

In this first issue, we dive straight into the world of Retail, a sector going through a prolonged period of upheaval and where some would argue the road to recovery lies in reinvention. 

Retail has always been a fast-moving sector, but the retail future that many of us predicted has suddenly arrived in our present very quickly.  Last year’s COVID-induced restrictions forced consumers to adapt their shopping habits overnight, and ‘Couch Commerce’ quickly became the norm for a whole range of sectors.  The resounding message for retailers was loud and clear; it was time to re-evaluate their routes to market and quickly.

The question many businesses are now asking is whether the move towards online shopping is here to stay? The overwhelming evidence suggests it is. In 2020, according to Statista, 50% of customers shopped online for products they’d only ever bought in shops before and a recent study by Mintel found that 90% of current grocery shoppers plan to keep shopping online. Only 5% stated that they would stop.

So what does this mean for retailers today? How do they continue not just to survive but thrive, and what technologies should they be looking to invest in to stay competitive and maximise their success?

Challenge #1.  Ensuring a seamless and superior commerce experience.

For owners of bricks and mortar operations, the big question is how do they maintain their profitability when footfall and physical transactions are in decline. 

Faced with such a stark dilemma, they’ll need to reimagine the role of the physical shop and merge both online and offline operations to offer customers the most appropriate means of purchase.  This may involve migrating their business rapidly into an e-commerce operation or eliminating lost sales in-store by integrating digital access to their customer touchpoints, enabling customers to order from an unlimited product range when stock isn’t available.

Image showing race car being fixed by a team

And retailers who are fortunate enough to have their business models already firmly established in the digital world will need to up their game to stay competitive and maximise their market share.   To do so, they might need to streamline their order processes, optimise the shopping experience through smarter and faster shipping, elevate their sales output and increase their conversion rates.

For both types of organisations, whether entering into a new e-commerce era or simply making an existing one more efficient, getting the right toolset like Commerce Cloud is important, but the greater challenge is building a technical team and the processes to support a business’s digital transformation. 

Challenge #2   Building a marketing function that can multitask like never before.

More channels to choose from gives retailers a chance to reach a much larger and geographically unlimited audience, but it also creates additional complexity. 

Digital marketing channels have seen exponential growth over the last 18 months, but it is becoming more difficult to find new customers and manage campaigns across a growing number of communities, social media channels and advertising networks. 

Magician multitasking

Brands are looking to new solutions such as the Advertising Studio from the Marketing Cloud, enabling brands to manage their display, social and search activity from a single integrated platform. It allows marketers to visualise, monitor, report on specific advertising performance and, most importantly, adapt in real-time, enabling brands to reach shoppers with the right offer, and the right time in the right place.  Operating as a powerful acquisition tool, it can also help identify prospects using lookalikes and re-engage inactive users within the customer journey across digital advertising.

Chee Ho Wan, Business Director at Trigg, says, “What we are finding is that clients are struggling to break even on the first click conversion, so are looking at the lifetime value of those customers to get a return on investment. Understanding the value of each customer through using AI and data science is an enabler to quickly decipher this data puzzle. That is where integrated solutions are really powerful.”

Challenge #3:  Making every customer interaction one that counts.

Technological advances have augmented our ability to personalise marketing messages. Right person, right place, right time has never been easier. But in an increasingly fragmented market, both in media and some would say in society; personalisation is becoming more important. 

Perhaps, rather than think ‘personal’, we should think about relevancy, and by doing that, open our thinking to what is relevant, not just personally but culturally and contextually. 

These factors all have an impact on how messages are both received and acted upon. A solution like Interaction Studio, which adopts AI technology, can help here. By allowing marketers to gain in-depth insights into individual customer behaviour, enabling websites to deliver personalised content and drive relevant customer experiences across all touchpoints in real-time to make true 1:1 engagement a reality.

Interactions that count

Challenge #4.  Building a loyal customer base to create a profitable business model.

Consumers have always been fickle creatures, but with so much choice and information available, driving advocacy and maintaining loyalty is increasingly challenging. And yet everyone knows that it’s repeat business that drives the real bottom-line forwards.

Crowd of supporters

To be profitable, retailers need to invest in brand activity and rethink the value exchange they offer customers in return for their subsequent purchases. 

Developing truly successful loyalty programmes means identifying customer behaviour patterns and providing offers that meet or even exceed their expectations. 

Integrated Loyalty Management solutions allow marketers to create a single customer viewpoint that enables personalisation at scale and allows your loyalty programme to be a strategic business driver by integrating it into every customer touchpoint. Most functionality across loyalty platform systems are fairly standard, so there is little value in reinventing the wheel.

Challenge #5  Delivering consistently great customer service, even when the going gets tough

Last but certainly not least in our round-up of retailer challenges is the deal-breaker of them all. 

You may have created a fantastic retail product, but if your customer service is unhelpful, unreliable or just plain hard to get in touch with, people will hear about it, and quite simply, you’ll lose customers over it and potentially damage your brand reputation.  

When the pandemic hit last year, the surge in demand for grocery home delivery options was enough to cause not just websites to crash but entire help centres.  Retailers were left struggling to manage a level of demand and in-bound customer enquiries that was on a par with Easter or Christmas, events that normally involve months of planning.  The public fall-out made the headlines, and even the most sophisticated retailers were left flailing. 

Happy customer

Although an extreme example, the events of 2020 have led to many retailers taking a hard look at their customer services infrastructure. Data is commonly silo’ed and this still remains the biggest challenge to delivering a seamless experience in customer support. Although technology and integrated tools like Service Cloud can be an enabler, if retailers want to deliver a great customer experience, getting internal teams collaborating and building the right processes is still the key driver to success in building a seamless customer experience.

In conclusion

Ultimately the real challenge for retailers now is that the battle for customers has become increasingly democratised. The increasing customer expectations in terms of service, personalisation and availability have been met with new complexities in marketing and e-commerce, with retailers also needing to transform their supply chain and operations to meet demand. 

The retailers that will thrive in this more fluid world of commerce will be the ones that use technology to understand and meet their customers where they are and not where they would like them to be.

Meet Trigg Digital

The team at Trigg Digital are here to help. We’ve been in your shoes before as a customer and have witnessed first-hand how CRM platforms like Salesforce can transform businesses rapidly into agile and powerful operations. That’s why we created Trigg and why we now use our experience and deep expertise to help other companies move further and faster with Salesforce.  With a focus on being friendly and accessible, highly cost-effective and with a laser-sharp focus on maximising your ROI, we pledge to optimise CRM processes to grow your business.  Get in touch on +44 203 239 8492 or at hello@triggdigital.com 

Steve Paul

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