Q&A: Customer engagement evolves with connectivity

At the recent MIT CIO Symposium, Bryan Kirschner, director of the research/strategy organization Apigee Institute, and Jerry Wolfe, CEO and founder of food industry platform services provider Vivanda, participated in a panel discussion on consumer connectivity and engagement. Chain Store Age followed up with the two experts to ask a few more questions about engaging today’s connected customer.



How can retailers use APIs (application program interfaces) to provide a more personalized customer experience?

Kirschner: APIs enable retailers to redefine the customer experience. For example, Burberrry uses APIs to give store staffers instant access to customer history and contextual data for a hands-on personalized experience. And Walgreens builds APIs into its CRM platform to connect customer fitness accounts (such as FitBit) to their loyalty accounts to reward them for their fitness activities.



APIs can also help improve the physical in-store experience. Customers are used to getting directions from anywhere to anywhere with their smartphones. If you can’t make it easy to find a product on the shelf, you’re not living up to customer expectations. Retailers can use APIs to deliver product-finding capability through beacons.



Wolfe: Retailers can use APIs to build a core experience and make it available to customers. You can plug a product catalog into a social or mobile experience. Also, many retailers in the food space are using APIs to bundle services into an experience. Grocery retailers can cluster offers to shoppers by product type. A grocer might have ground beef on sale and highlight coupons on other items that go with ground beef recipes.



How is the increasing popularity of apps affecting customer engagement, and how can retailers avoid “app overload”?

Kirschner: Retailers have a potential advantage with apps because your customer is already doing business with you. The app should be used as an opportunity to help customers do something they want to do. It should provide a useful service, like deliver coupons or help find store locations. Don’t think about Web advertising, although some content that helps customers may also be promotional.



Only 27% of consumers who use retail apps report being satisfied, so obviously retailers need to step up to the challenge. Be useful, and help people in a tangible way.



Wolfe: From the food retailer perspective, there are few things people do with more frequency than shop for groceries. Consumers average more than two grocery shopping trips per week. Retailers should support this frequent activity with convenience. Understand what your app users are trying to accomplish. The app should fit in with the life of the shopper.



How should retailers take advantage of constant customer connectivity for personalized and seamless engagement?



Kirschner: Retailers who excel build their customer experience from their brand. Walgreens, for example, has 8,000 U.S. stores and a large percentage of the population lives five minutes from one. Using an API, Walgreens lets customers print photos directly from its app to their local store. The service is also open to partners, such as third-party photo repository and custom greeting card providers. Walgreens builds on its convenience.

Wolfe: More than 50% of purchases in the food and CPG space are digitally influenced across eight to 12 touch-points. Consumers get information not just from retailers, but from other sources.



Retailers need to offer their brand as a service. This includes not only the retailer, but the whole brand and product community. Determine who your channel partners are. Refocus your brand communication from “Come to me, I control every aspect of the relationship,” to “I’ll be with you wherever you are at that moment in your life.”



It’s a notion of brand services, of getting attention because you’re useful. Connect with customers, rather than just tell them a story. We’re on the cusp of a paradigm shift in branding.