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Consumers want the best of both worlds, we want to be served across all channels. Melissa, we have spoken about Hyper Personalisation in great detail previously. How do retailers unlock Hyper Personalisation and why should they?

Retailing 101, we as consumers expect brands to understand our needs and expectations. Hyper personalization is providing the right products, at the right place and time, according to their customer’s preferences. So the sweet spot here is that it enables the retailers to deliver SPECIFIC tailor-made communications to shoppers’ according to what they’ve bought before or what they’ve browsed, what they’ve clicked on in an email. And these messages are delivered across a range of channels that a customer uses to interact with the retailer i.e. the mobile device, social media, desktop etc…

So that speaks to the How: Leveraging the data that you are collating from your omnichannel experience, your marketing activity to curate an experience for your customer. 

The Why: simply put, do it, get it right and you’ll massively increased the likelihood of the consumer purchasing and also the likelihood of them coming back.

When you think about it, if you walked into your favourite shop and you’re met by a confident, empowered customer centric frontline retailer, who knows YOU; your favourite products, your size, your buying habits and can pre-empt your next wants or needs, then you’re going to feel special. Likewise, if you grab that first cup of tea in the morning and you sit down to flick through your emails and one jumps out at you because again, it knows YOU, with your favourite products, your size, your buying habits and can pre-empt your next wants or needs, then you’re going to feel special. Consumer trust in that brand increases as does their loyalty. And this is ALL scalable… 

But also remember what I said earlier about the expectations economy. If you don’t do this, if you don’t meet their expectations and another brand does… The customer will leave, and they won’t come back. 

What advice would you offer to a retail SME in 2023?

Two key things:

1. Our people need to be our focus.

My first bit of advice, as someone that spends a lot of time training retailers, educating through undergraduate and apprenticeship programmes is that we need to think about why we are hiring?  If it’s just get someone to do boring procedures (that actually could be automated), then what are we adding to the potential employees’ working life and why are we taking them away from the customer? Are they trained enough? 

I see this issue weekly- investment goes into tech or physical stores, as it should be, but retailers come to me for training as an afterthought- when it could all sit well together as a long term growth strategy. Can we upskill our teams be as agile as the industry needs us to be?  Internal service is as powerful as talking to your customers, so give your staff an omni-channel experience and communicate differently. 

2. My second piece of advice, is back to basics. 

What does every aspect of the customer journey really look and feel like instore or online? Does your returns process frustrate them? Does it make customers walk away at the point of purchase? Do you shop windows need a complete overhaul? It’s so easy to get distracted with the new ideas, that sometimes we miss the obvious. 

To create the theatre of retail both on and offline- we have to bring the wow experiences every single time. So that’s a shiny, well stocked store that its exciting and enticing to walk into but also social media or online channels that click and connect with me in the manner that I want to use it. Ferarri have hung a full size F1 car in one of their stores, we see the constant churn of amazing windows coming out of Selfridges, but if the basics aren’t right, if the level of service isn’t present in store then you won’t see the return on invest because people won’t shop.