As more retailers look towards mobile to interact with customers, what are the benefits of moving away from paper to digital engagement?

Mobile payment

Asda has signed a deal to digitise the processing of paper coupons at the point of sale (PoS). By digitising the back-end process, retailers will be able track offers and build a picture of consumer behaviour, allowing them to push more relevant marketing messages to loyal customers.

But speaking to Phil Blundell CEO of Eagle Eye, the company behind the digital counting and reconciliation, digitising the back office is just the first phase of going paperless.

Paperless communications

After getting rid of paper counting, which saves significant amounts of money, retailers can then look at offering digital coupons and awards, Blundell explained. He pointed to One Stop using SMS marketing linked to beacon technology, in a step away from paper-based coupons.

Joachim Pinhammer, research director of retail technology at Planet Retail, agrees, saying the industry has already moved on significantly when it comes to digitising paper-based back-end processes. But the next step is to move forward with paperless customer engagement.

“More and more sales assistants are equipped with mobile systems to give them access to information on product and customers,” he said. “The next step is to also go paperless with consumer communication, I think the typical paper-based communications like receipts, tickets, warranty notes and stuff like that is just starting to become an option.”

“Customers have too many cards in their wallets,” he added. “And they’re moving towards mobile devices to manage their lives.”

Miya Knights, senior research analyst at IDC, said paperless communications are being adopted by retailers for more centralised, dynamic control, as well as cost savings and productivity gains.

But couponing is not the only way to communicate with your customer and save paper – Maplin for example has told Retail Week is wants to introduce paperless receipts in the near future, while Argos rolled the service out to all 750 stores at the end of last year.

Knights also points to digital signage instead of printed PoS materials, emailed digital packs for customers taking out credit agreements, and QR codes and beacons to replace paper coupons.

The cloud

Taking Apple as an example, its retail stores were early adopters of e-receipts. Its customers were encouraged to use this option to have their documentation sent digitally, rather than potentially losing a piece of paper.

With the onset of ordering taxis through mobile apps such as Hailo and Uber, mobile payments, as well as e-receipts, are now more commonplace.

“Coupons in the cloud is the goal for everyone, but it’s technically difficult to achieve.”

Oliver Harrison, loyalty strategy director at Dunnhumby

Pinhammer said the adoption of mobile coupons, tickets and e-receipts by consumers has been spurred on by the infiltration of cloud services because these documents can now be backed up much more seamlessly and securely.

Meanwhile, Oliver Harrison, loyalty strategy director at Dunnhumby, says one of the biggest complaints about coupons is that customers forget to use them. “You leave them on the fridge or forget about them in your wallet,” he said. “But offering them in the digital space completes that loop, and coupons in the cloud is the goal for everyone, but it’s technically difficult to achieve.”

Data collection

Moving consumer interaction from paper to digital means retailers can get an omnichannel view of their customer’s retail journey. For instance when providing your email so a retailer can send you an e-receipt, you would likely be opted into marketing emails in the future.

Pinhammer added: “Like everything companies do in communication with consumers, first of all they want to have more data and information about clients.”

Pinhammer explained that if retailers have customer’s emails, they can link their online shopping accounts to their in-store shopping habbits to create a more omnichannel view of the customer.

But working for the data analytics giant Dunhumby, Harrison said matching emails is not as easy as it sounds: “You have to make the assumption that the email you assign to a consumer is the same one they used to sign up to your website with. And data-match rates for email are unreliable.”

“It’s certainly doable and the more data you have the more you can triangle it –  but if they’re not joined up you can create multiple views of the customer,” he warned.