Customer Intimacy: How Omnichannel Tools Can Support Your Strategy
Posted by Julia Morrissey on Jun 23, 2022
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Getting to know your customer has never been more important. With an omnichannel approach––one that bridges the physical and digital shopping experiences–– it’s much easier to develop a deeper relationship with your customers or customer intimacy.
This post discusses customer intimacy and how omnichannel tools will help support your customer intimacy strategy.
Customer intimacy is about gaining a deep understanding of customers, so you can anticipate their needs and preferences and foster long-term relationships. It can be measured by your churn, product adoption rate, and net promoter score.
By knowing your customer intimately, you can continually adjust and redesign products that will meet or even exceed their expectations. Retail brands that excel at customer intimacy innovate faster and develop customer experiences that drive long-term customer loyalty.
Shoppers really want to get to know and develop a relationship with your brand, and failing to provide them with that opportunity puts you at risk of losing their business.
It’s not uncommon for brands to lose business due to poor customer relationships. In fact, 66% of customers said they would switch brands if they felt they were being treated as a number rather than an individual.
Brands that invest in developing a customer intimacy strategy can retain more customers, boost customer lifetime value, and improve their bottom line. Shoppers appreciate brands that invest in the relationship, not just the transaction, and are willing to pay more for better service.
Your customer intimacy strategy should be focused on offering your customers exactly what they want and need and delivering value to the marketplace. You must get to know your customers and segment them, so you can deliver each group the unique experience they expect. Because let’s face it, not all customers will want weekly new product updates or a highly personalized birthday message from a store associate – they may see this as pushy or an invasion of privacy – however others may love this approach.
Get close enough to your customers to find out exactly how they want to be clinteled to and what products speak to them.
To achieve customer intimacy you need to understand your customer. It’s essential to find out their preferences and what they genuinely think of your brand and current products.
You can go about this by collecting data and forming real connections with customers through direct, personalized communication. Omnichannel tools, such as a mobile point of sale and consumer app, can enable you to drive customer intimacy.
A powerful component of a successful customer intimacy strategy is store associates. With a mobile point of sale (mPOS), associates can take clienteling to a new level. They never have to leave a customer’s side to look for inventory in the back of the store or complete a transaction behind a clunky cash register.
An mPOS not only gives associates more face-time with customers but it also allows them to access useful data. Store associates have full visibility into customers’ purchase history across channels, enabling them to tailor their recommendations and more effectively upsell and cross-sell.
They can also create digital “black books.” This allows store associates to keep track of customer preferences, birthdays, anniversaries, and more. Then, whenever the customer visits next, that information can be viewed and used by any store associate to build hyper-personalized relationships.
A mobile POS truly brings the joy back to retail, allowing store associates to do what they do best and help customers find products they love.
Building relationships with customers doesn’t solely happen in-store. Customers can also interact with your brand through a consumer app and store associates can use this channel to conduct remote selling.
A shopping app naturally gets brands closer to customers, combining the physical and digital shopping experience, and putting you directly into the shopper’s pocket. By adding another shopping channel for customers, brands gain access to even more customer information.
Marketing teams and in-store staff can use this information to better serve customers and deliver hyper-personalized SMS or in-app messages. For example, maybe a product a customer had been browsing is now back in stock or the matching shirt to the skirt they recently bought is now available. You can let them know via the app. Customers are 35x more likely to open a mobile message than an email, so it’s an ideal way to keep customers in the loop.
A consumer app can also enhance your loyalty program. Mobile loyalty personalizes the shopping experience and makes customers feel more connected to your brand.
An app is a great way to learn about and interact with your customers so you can cultivate long-lasting relationships.
Brands that invest in getting to know their customers can expect to increase a customer’s lifetime value. Today’s shopper has high expectations, and it’s critical to understand their wants and needs.
Omnichannel tools can help you drive customer intimacy. Want to learn more about NewStore’s omnichannel solutions? Request a demo today.
