Linking up customer data across the different shopping channels is still a challenge for retailers. Rebecca Thomson finds out how they can approach it depending on their business’ needs.

There are now more channels and ways for customers to interact with a business

If someone spends their morning researching coats online, and goes to a store in the afternoon to buy one, how can you make sure you know it’s the same person?

It’s one of the biggest questions of multichannel retailing, and one plenty struggle with. One problem with attempting the work is that a single view of the customer means different things for different retailers. For some, it’s about linking the online research with a store purchase while for others, it’s about finding out how a customer researched online, what they said about a product on social networks and a mobile phone purchase. The overall aim, however, is to get a holistic view of the customer across the whole organisation, no matter how they interact with the business and which combination of channels they use.

Carpetright group IT and ecommerce director Ian Woosey says it’s a big project but worth the effort: “It’s quite a lot of work, but we know a lot more about our customers than we did before.”

Time to invest

In the last year, retailers have started investing in this in earnest. Kingfisher chief executive Ian Cheshire said earlier this year at the National Retail Federation conference in New York that the business was about to start investing much more heavily in data. And Adidas vice-president of global retail Chris Aubrey said at the World Retail Congress in Berlin in September: “We have 58 databases across the world and now we have the ability to start connecting that together.”

The challenge for retailers now is that there are more channels than ever, and more ways for a customer to interact with a business. Not only this, but each part of a retail business tends to operate separately. “Currently, many IT systems sit in silos, and operate independently from each other, creating a complex environment where it is difficult to get applications to talk to each other, let alone add a new channel to the mix,” says Roy Patrick, multichannel product manager at IT services supplier Torex. Any multichannel retailer will eventually have to overcome this.

There are two main things retailers need to achieve the elusive single view of a customer. First is data – it’s impossible to get anywhere without good quality, clean data. “It can seem time consuming, but making sure data is good quality is fundamental to getting everything right,” says Alex Fovargue, retail consultant at data analytics company SAS UK.

The bigger picture

The next step is to integrate different data sets, bringing together everything you have on the online customer, the store shopper, the social network profile and the mobile phone user and creating one big picture.

“The picture you have of the customer builds up over time,” says Fovargue. “It may not be easy to identify them on Twitter, for instance, because people have unusual usernames and use different email addresses, but there are lots of tools out there that deal with web-based data.”

From here, every time customers identify themselves they can be tracked. Logging in online, using in-store Wi-Fi or using a loyalty card will enable their behaviour to be tracked and recorded, and the information used to provide helpful offers and promotions.

But it’s this process of identifying the customer that presents one of the biggest problems for retailers on a multichannel journey. Woosey says Carpetright has been quite lucky in this respect, as customers must give their address and name both in store – for the carpet to be fitted – and online if they want samples sent out.

 “It’s a very tactile purchase and people want to see what they are buying, so we will send samples or they can book an appointment and someone can come to their house. When they come to the store to purchase, we can use their web activity as a direct driver of their store sale even though it was an activity that may have taken weeks.”

Every retailer is different, but there are some lessons to be learnt from Woosey’s experience. In each retailer’s customer journey, there are points where the shopper may be open to handing over their details. Figuring out where in the process it might help them to register for a free sample, for instance, or provide an incentive to hand over their details at the till, could enable retailers to start collecting the data they need.

A loyalty card is an obvious answer, but not every retailer has one. Click and collect can help as well, but only applies to those purchases where the customer has chosen to use that service. The other route, according to BT Expedite head of customer relationship management Tanya Bowen, is to ask for an email address or name at the point of sale in-store. Shoppers may need convincing, and this is where it becomes crucial to educate and incentivise store staff. “The benefits need to be very clear to the sales staff, and they need to be convinced so that it trips off the tongue,” she says.

Personal targeting

Other options for in-store identification revolve around mobile phones, which could be scanned against a reader as a shopper enters the store. Or free in-store Wi-Fi could be offered in return for basic personal details.

During the journey, the retailer can follow the progress of the average customer journey. If a shopper stops in the middle of the process, they can be targeted and prompted to resume. Woosey says: “It enables you to market to customers that have shown some interest rather than trying to market to thousands of people. You can channel your resources more effectively.”

He adds the work isn’t particularly expensive but a bit laborious, and he says it was a “complicated” development. But despite the challenges, Woosey says the light it’s shone on Carpetright’s customers is invaluable. “It challenges your assumptions about your customers’ behaviour. Before, we didn’t quite understand the customer journey and we now know a lot more about them than we used to.”

Ultimately, this particular type of multichannel project allows you to get feedback from customers without appearing too intrusive. But Woosey’s work isn’t over yet – he wants to find out more about why customers abandon purchases. “We understand more about when customers do purchase than when they don’t.”

A single customer view isn’t an easy thing for a retailer to get, but it will be invaluable as the industry moves further into the cross-channel era.

Beyond the single customer view

Once you are able to see customer activity across two channels or more, it becomes easier to track the return on certain types of marketing, says Carpetright group IT and ecommerce director Ian Woosey. Carpetright spends money on ensuring they’re top of the list in the Google search rankings, and on affiliate marketing where the retailer uses third-party websites to encourage their users to visit the Carpetright website. “We have taken things one stage further because if a user visits our website as a result of an affiliate site, we can track it all the way through to their eventual store purchase.” The affiliate site only gets paid if one of its users goes on to make a purchase, and it gives Carpetright a direct measure of how effective its online advertising is, allowing it to target resources more effectively.