thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz

Social Shopping = Groupon? Nope – this is only the beginning

Some time ago my wife Nicole posted a small series of blogs about the topic of Loyalty on ciber.com. In these readable blogs she identified and summarised three main strategies of acquiring loyal customers, which are Every day low price Classic loyalty programs that base upon cash-back options or that are points based Hybrid models To gain and retain loyal customers it is necessary for Retailers (or brands, or …) to get into a mutual engagement with the customers. In order to achieve this it needs something like a WOW!-factor. An important way to get this factor for Retailers is the usage of social media (or social CRM when being more advanced). Every day low price of course means plain ole price competition. No WOW!-factor whatsoever involved here. On top of that there can be only one competitor that actually has the lowest price. All the others go in from second place onwards. Given that, competition only on price is the surefire way to a Retailer’s death if the Retailer is not the one with the lowest price. Price competition kills margin, service levels, shopping experience, ability to gather and analyze more data on customers, as it needs an investment, which needs to be paid out of lowering margins. Every day low price works well for highly commoditized products and services, else it is dangerous. Customers will not see the real price of a good or service anymore but ask/search for a discount. It is extremely difficult to change this behavior once it shows up – and we consumers are already educated about the fact that the same product...

Social Shopping – A Retail Future

A while ago I blogged about threats and solutions in the retail industry that have their origin in rise of social media; with this post I would like to continue on this topic, focusing on possible solutions for retail companies. This blog also ties in to a recent article by Mark Tamis on Social CRM in Retail. In his article Mark describes an interesting and elaborate scenario that showcases a technology enabled, consumer and network driven decision process, using the example of buying a party dress. This example is interesting because, although the process is entirely consumer driven, the involved companies use the technology to add value to the customer, thus achieving a win-win situation. What the involved companies (a retailer and a hairdresser) are doing is establishing customer loyalty by [unordered_list style=”green-dot”] Engaging the customer Providing a superior shopping experience, combining online and offline aspects Enabling the customer to get immediate feedback from their network [/unordered_list] With this the two involved companies manage to align their interests with the customer’s interests. In other words, they are distinguishing themselves through service, instead of price. Trying to achieve loyalty through the offer of “least price” is a surefire way to death. To quote the 1986 Highlander movie: There can be only one. Although the scenario described by Mark sounds very advanced it isn’t. The enabling technologies exist and “just” need to be tied together. We are not talking Star Trek here. I really like this scenario as it depicts what could be. Still, integration is a hard business. Because of this I would like to come forward with another scenario...

Some Klout Score Musings

Today I’d like to present some musings about the klout score. Now, mine is not particularly high – actually it is pretty low – as you can see below; but the curve is interesting, if set into a context. So far I only followed my klout score pretty idly, till I started to do some minor experiments on 16.02.2011. You see some immediate effect on the day after. This is mainly due to me posting a blog entry and communicating this via Twitter and LinkedIn. There also should be a communication via CIBER’s Twitter account. This usually leads to a few clicks and one or two followers on Twitter. However, the real point I’d like to draw your attention to is the 22.02.2011. This is the day the 6.3 earthquake struck in Christchurch downtown and caused severe devastation. As you may know, I normally blog about CRM and social CRM on the CIBER site, so that event is clearly outside my usual activity. Now the catch is: I do live in Christchurch and quite some of my network friends do know this. So I did some simple things by updating my status in the few networks that I actively use: [unordered_list style=”green-dot”] LinkedIn with direct update to Twitter Facebook XING [/unordered_list] As you can imagine this still caused some reactions of my friends – quite some of which are real life friends. Of course there are still one or two CRM related posts of mine in there, plus an opinion on a political matter in Germany, but the majority of all conversations deals with the Christchurch quake, and the...

Social CRM for Retail – Threats and Solutions

Brick-and-mortar retail businesses face a combination of ever-increasing customer expectations, customers being “educated” to expect and receive promotions, and of course an ever increasing competition in the market place for their customers’ share of mind and share of wallet. On top of all this they need to realize that they do not control the communication to their customers anymore, let alone being capable of controlling the communication in between their customers. As many bloggers, including myself, and analysts already stated, the advent of extremely user friendly and ubiquitous mobile devices and web applications essentially decoupled retailers from communications between their customers and even led to their marketing messages becoming part of the “background noise” for lots of consumers – just something one filters out when it comes to getting serious information. Of course there are exceptions, especially considering that retail businesses reacted to this threat. For retailers it is about being where the customers are. This started with setting up transactional web sites (web shops) to drive additional sales, using more and different ways to address customers, e.g. setting up and participating in communities, building fan pages on Facebook, Twitter streams, keeping in touch with exciting new services like Groupon, building capabilities to monitor and participate in discussions in forums, creating loyalty programs, and so on. Quite some of the challenges facing retailers have the potential of being disruptive to their business models. Take Groupon as an example: Groupon is the successful implementation of a scheme that shifts the power balance drastically to the buyer (consumer) side; the scheme is similar to the earlier development of retailer purchase organizations...

A Company like Me

We trust those sources most, who are like us. “A company like me”, as Paul Greenberg dubbed it in an article for destinationCRM, is a vision that depicts a trustworthy, almost human, company; maybe this vision is not an achievable one, but it still is a very good one since easily related to and understood. It clearly shows the path to the ultimate goal of each company: To add value to customers by being trustworthy. Adding value to customers increases their loyalty and having more loyal customers directly translates into an improved bottom line since loyal customers have a higher value than irregular customers. They spend more and more often. Loyal customers furthermore often act as ambassadors for “their” companies and brands thus providing a free-of-charge marketing- and sales force which results in a better top line. As a matter of fact and as stated in several blogs before, people – customers – are more connected than ever. They get information they trust on products and services anytime and anywhere via their personal networks and can easily confirm or prove wrong all information that is pushed out by companies. They achieve this via usage of services like Epinions, Tripadvisor, Facebook, Priceme, and so on. Customers use these sites from their home computers and via their smart phones, so that they even take ad-hoc decisions informed. As a result the push approach does not work anymore. Companies are no more in control of the information that is available about them and their brands. Successful companies embrace this. As an example (and sorry to all the not mentioned ones, …) we...