Customer acquisition campaign- Learning Launch

Challenge:

I lead the CRM Marketing team for a retailer in Middle East. Being retail business, CRM and Loyalty plays  a key role in Marketing. Retailer has a popular loyalty management program running for 19years and  has a significant customer base. This loyalty program offers standard points for every purchase and  additional bonus points for seasonal campaigns, birthdays and Anniversaries.

In addition to this loyalty program, as a collaborative strategy, retailer has partnered with few other  players in the market like Airlines, Automobile agencies. Employee of these specific partners will get an  additional x% discount when they shop at these retail outlets by showcasing this employee ID cards.

On a recent review of this Business Process of giving additional discounts it was identified that orders  with partner discounts didn’t have any customer info linked and it was applied as manual cashier  discount from POS (Point of Sale)

Challenges highlighted:

•  No customer information captured

•  Security risks of cashier misusing this discount type

•  No digital marketing scope without customer information

•  How do we differentiate existing loyalty program and this parallel partner program?

•  New Tech changes required to enable this customer acquisition journey for partners

•  Training store staff with new Business Process

Selection:

Being a retailer and customer facing, best feedback is from the customer. So, we decided to pivot new  customer acquisition process using Learning Launch method. We decided to enable this in 3 pilot stores,  with a mix of mono stores, big department stores, kiosks. With different range of customer accessing  these stores we should be able to understand customers’ response to this initiative and make  improvements for mass roll out to all stores. As a team we all agreed on the fundamental mechanics of  the campaign from different stakeholders like Tech Team, Business Development team, Marketing team,  Operations team, Store Managers, Finance and Security, Loss Prevention and Risk teams.

Approach:

It is an effective strategy to first launch in the pilot stores, understand initial teething issues and fix  them, make it fool proof and then launch to all 200+ stores. This approach is easy for a fall back  mechanism, meaning, if there are any major issues, it is easy to roll back the changes only in these 3  stores without having major operational issues and cost.

Application:

Coincidently this project was implemented in the same time I was going through this course. I got an  opportunity to execute what I learnt from this course. I started with the queries, what is ? What If?  What wows? What works?

What is  ?

•  No customer capture process

•  POS (Point of Sale) is the only channel to capture customer information

•  Huge dependency on cashiers

•  Customer spends more time on the counter during billing process

What if?

•  Enable customer self service

•  Use modern technologies with smartphone and QR codes

•  Simple 2 step process

•  Reduce significant time customer spends on the counter

What wows?

•  Simple quick smart process using smart phones and QR code

What works?

•  Place a QR code on every cash counter

•  Let customer scan the QR code from their smart phones

•  Scanning launches a web form on their mobile browser

•  Customer to fill simple details like name, contact info and agree/disagree data usage T&C (GDPR  compliance)

•  On submitting this form, customer gets enrolled to the program instantly and get a digital card.

•  Real time integration was done backend to update the customer info real time

•  Now when customer shows this digital card to the cashier, they scan the digital card saved as  barcode, link the card to the transaction and system automatically applies additional partner  discount by validating the profile.

•  Whole process is automated and completely removed manual update by cashier

Insights:

The campaign launch was a whopping success. We were expecting 50+ enrollments per day per store,  but we received 175+ enrollments per day per store average.

Customers felt engaged using this method of enrollment.

They felt modern using smart phones and usage of digital cards than printed which again is  environmentally sustainable method.

They were also impressed with the time taken to complete the whole process and of the fact that it is  self-service without having the need to interact with store staff.

We also captured few other feedbacks from customer to further improve their experience from a GUI  perspective.

We also noticed 50% of the customer enrolled to the partner program for additional discounts also had  registered to retailer’s loyalty program before.

On a data driven approach, we are now deliberating if we should merge these to programs to one and  let system handle rewards automatically  with some intelligence built using latest technologies.

Again, as Phase 2, we have formed a design team to enhance the program and make it simple effective  and attractive for the customers and easily maintainable for the operations and tech teams.

