Make more than token effort with mapping the customer journey for success
The relationship between shopper and merchant used to be very simple: merchant advertises its wares, shopper visits store, shopper pays merchant for goods. The odd complaint or return aside, this relationship pretty much went unchanged for hundreds if not thousands of years. You could say that the retailer often had much of the control. Nowadays, things are a bit different. Competitive and global marketplaces, evolving consumer attitudes and technology innovation have seen a shift in the balance of power. As consumers we can shop whenever, wherever, and with whomever we like. The age of the mobile phone has put the retailer in our hands in more ways than one. The upshot of this is that businesses need to stay agile, reactive and ready if they’re to win and keep customers.
This has been a prime driver behind the birth of the omni-channel approach to retail. Brands are now present, visible and engage-able online, in-store, via apps and beyond. They need to support as many channels as possible to meet the needs of consumers, and do so in a consistent manner across each. This doesn’t mean in messaging alone; this includes payment, experience and products. With Christmas on the doorstep, it’s those who do this well who will be ringing in a truly happy new year.
What is Omni-channel?
The concept of omni-channel shopping has been gaining traction in the industry for some time because retailers are more than ever having to react to the evolving shopping habits of the modern customer.
Customers today not only have the high street to shop, far from it. They can hit the phone, go online via any type of device and even purchase via an app on their mobile. This kind of shopper is looking for the next best bargain, the lowest cost and the best service, and is testing retailers’ adaptability. According to recent research, for example, a large proportion of customers used multiple channels to buy their Christmas gifts in 2014. In fact, it was estimated that as many as 43 million Britons were using a combination of in-store, online and click-and-collect to purchase products.
That figure is only going to climb this year, as retailers strive to create the best possible customer experience that meets customers’ demands for quick, simple and convenient fulfilment of their shopping desires. Unfortunately, some retailers are struggling with the challenges of an omni-channel world, especially when it comes to creating a consistent and seamless customer payment experience across offline and online channels in a secure and compliant way.
Security is a Top Priority
Every retailer must keep their data and payments infrastructure secure. By complying with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) rules around customer payment data they are showing their intent to keep customer data safe. Yet even those with the best intentions can be victims of security breaches which can incur regulatory fines, but even worse dent customer confidence.
According to research from Censuswide focusing on retailers in 2015, almost 70% of UK retailers have lost important data, with 22% having been hacked. A worrying statistic when personal and payment data is often the end goal of a cyber-attack.
Tokenisation Holds the Key
There is a technology out there to help retailers big and small meet the challenges of an omni-channel environment. Tokenisation is a payment security technology that helps secure customer data. Not only does it encrypt customer data at the point of sale, it also offers the potential for merchants to understand payment patterns without requiring any personal data. It does so by assigning an alphanumeric code, or ‘token,’ to the payment data when a transaction is being processed. Therefore, information about a customer’s card and personal details are reduced to a string of numbers and letters, indecipherable to any fraudsters who could have gained the data via a data breach.
As the token is associated to the customer’s payment card, tokenisation enables merchants to can gain insight into customer behaviour and spending patterns and how individual customers are using different channels for shopping, all the while keeping transaction data safe.
Once in place, the benefits of such a solution will be felt by retailers as well as customers. For example, when a customer makes their first purchases in-store, their details are kept securely while a token is attributed to the payment card. As the customer continues to shop, online or offline, merchants can build a better profile of the customer purchase patterns.
Insight to Success
From a customer experience perspective, omni-channel is becoming the norm, in the way that the traditional consumer/merchant relationship once was. The next step for the retailer is to see how they can turn the additional data available to them into real insight, particularly customer payment data which has often been an untapped resource. Customer expectation is arguably at its greatest now – look at the demand for free delivery and next-day-delivery alone – and this expectation extends to brands knowing their wants and needs. As such retailers need to make use of the tools available to them, like tokenisation. With tokenisation, they can safeguard customer data to create a superior experience while gaining insight they have previously not had to engage with customers in an effective and targeted way.
