Montreal Transit's Innovative App Drives High Engagement

Direct Marketing News (DMNews.com) Feature Story.

Deep consumer insights and personalized messaging and offerings are now essential requirements for marketers. But many companies are just beginning to understand the unprecedented opportunities that deeply connecting with consumers for engaging experiences can bring.

Today, engaging customers through ongoing, personalized, experience-based interactions is the key to developing loyalty and future sales.

Findings from our VoC (Voice of Customer) research indicate important new requirements for customer engagement:

• Customers expect companies to maintain engagement and value throughout their lifecycles, not just during acquisition and renewal.
• Marketers must improve the customer experience across every point of contact with their organization.
• Customer experiences apply to all elements of the media mix and all departments within an organization.

In a powerful customer engagement experience, customers:

• Discover and share information about your company
• Learn about your products
• Receive personalized offers and communications

To make this happen, companies need to:

• Learn the most effective ways to monetize opportunities
• Respond quickly to match inventory to customer demand
• Be nimble enough to rapidly refine offers based on customer insights
• Prep sales and other departments with critical customer information

Making the commitment to a customer experience strategy

According to  “The Integrated Customer Experience Report 2013” by eConsultancy, a survey of nearly 900 companies and agencies, data systems and processes are still the primary factors that hold companies back from improving their customer experiences. Additionally, the complexity of customer experience marketing leaves many respondents unsure of where and how to begin. Consider:

• Fifty-eight percent of companies are still only developing strategies in this area, compared to just 20% of companies with well-developed strategies.
• While more than half of the respondents see data (63%) and systems and processes (54%) as critical areas for delivering integrated customer experiences. Most companies have inadequate capabilities in both areas.
• Nine out of 10 companies say improved customer retention/brand loyalty is a benefit of integrated customer experiences, but just more than half of companies surveyed (54%) have the means to measure retention and loyalty to quantify their experience marketing effectiveness.

Experience marketing drives engagement

I recently saw a presentation by Layla Sabourian Tarwé, senior product marketing manager, global marketing, at SAP, whose main focus is to help drive consumer engagement initiatives at SAP. During the presentation she explained how Société de Transport de Montréal (STM) leveraged SAP's Precision Marketing software to develop a new interactive mobile app call Merci.

Layla had these important insights to share about best practices regarding the customer engagement experience: “Marketers need to embrace change and understand the value of connecting with consumers in innovative new ways. The first step in engaging consumers more deeply is being able to generate deep insights about their preferences and preferably, in real time.”

Layla added this key point, “But now with all these new channels, we're at the point where we're actually starting to have too much information. The key is being able to analyze massive amounts of data from multiple sources to create a 360-degree view of each consumer and then act on these insights in real time. As consumers have started to use new channels, their expectations for how marketers should engage with them have increased dramatically.”

In fact, through co-innovation with SAP, Société de Transport de Montréal launched its Merci app to help improve its customer experience. Merci presents customers with exclusive, personalized offers based on their profiles and preferences. The program offers participants instant gratification without having to work or wait to collect points.

“STM wanted to avoid being ‘just another loyalty card that collected points.' It wanted to build an ecosystem of partners and offers that would ‘reward users on the spot' for their continued loyalty,” said Pierre Bourbonniére, STM's head of marketing. “In the backend, STM's ability to segment geo-localized promotions ensures that notifications are a match with the commuters' demographics and personal preferences, information they have volunteered in return for relevant offers. Whether they're waiting at a bus stop, or just enjoying the ride to downtown attractions, these customers access our award-winning mobile app—STM Merci—to to benefit from relevant offers—as well as a reward scheme—that respects their privacy and personal tastes. The program, which connects directly with commuters on the move, has the potential in all verticals, not just transport, to seek new ways to use mobile to reward individual consumers for their loyalty.”

STM encouraged riders to download the app and complete preference information about their interests. Half of the riders chose to complete their profiles.

STM designed the app to adhere to strict Canadian privacy compliance regulations. The back-end of the application splits commuter data into two separate databases, with key personal details "de-identified.” 

What marketers can learn from the Merci app 

• The app allows STM to create and shape demand in real time and adjust marketing campaigns for partner organizations to maximize their ROI, instead of waiting to analyze their effectiveness.
• The app enables the company to rapidly match supply to a changing market and optimize inventory levels and product assortment based on the latest consumer demand data.
• It allows for the development of new offerings and business models—using consumer insights to refine existing offerings, uncover new consumer needs, and create new monetization opportunities through an incentive to travel more often or switch to an annual subscription.
• Customers are able to receive geo-located offers based on wherever they happen to be.

And customers value this service. The click-through for the Merci app has been four-times greater than industry averages.  

Key takeaways for developing your customer engagement experience

• Customer engagement experiences need to be highly personalized. Immersive experiences such as social media need to cultivate a sense of connection.
• Consumers engage through a variety of media, so it's essential to give them the option to experience your brand effortlessly across multiple channels. 
• Customers want to receive instant gratification for making transactions, accessing services, and providing feedback any time and on all media of their choice. 
• Companies need to unify and integrate different sources of customer data to deliver consistent experiences at every point of contact.
• Marketers should develop a fully rounded view of each customer that includes history, personalization preferences, usage and future intent information, and prediction of lifetime value.

4 Tips That Transform Holiday Shoppers Into Loyal Customers

Challenge: Tis the season for customers to think “sale.” However, while customers are concentrating on transactions, companies need to think beyond the holidays. We hope the following 4 tips will help you move beyond “quickie transactions” for the 2013 holiday season to creating relationships for 2014 and beyond.

1. Understand the journey customers take with your company, from prospect to loyal customer. Know what each customer segment requires and deliver on your brand promise at every stage of their customer journey. See our previous article DM News Spotlight Article, The Sales Funnel is Dead.

2. Be a Holiday Shopping Resource.
Consumers will be receiving hundreds, if not thousands, of sales offers. By asking them to tell you about their needs and then helping with personalized solutions, you will cut through the clutter and create a competitively differentiating shopping experience.

3. Be Multi Channel.

Showrooming is not a threat, it is a reality. Showrooming occurs when shoppers are at a retail location and use their mobile devices to research prices or terms at competitive online merchants. More than three quarters of shoppers have examined merchandise in a brick-and-mortar store and ultimately purchased that merchandise at a lower price, online, according to new data from CFI Group’s Holiday Retail Spending Survey. 

Additionally, a recent survey conducted by Deloitte found that two-thirds of smartphone owners planned to use their phones during holiday shopping, to find store locations, compare prices and look for product information.

Therefore, make it easy for customers to interact with your company effortlessly, via the media of their choice.

4. Be consistent across channels.
During holiday shopping season customers and prospects are doing a lot of research. Make sure you are providing a consistent multichannel experience, not multichannel frustration. A frictionless experience is key for customers who will give up on your company when information is different across media, or difficult to find;

» Walmart is partnering with online resources such as Google to enable shoppers to not only search for a product, but also find out if it is available in their local store. Stephen F. Quinn, chief marketing officer at Walmart explained, “Google will tell you if your local Walmart has Weber grills in stock, and it will tell you that store’s location.” Walmart started experimenting with this process earlier this year and has increased its efforts for the holidays.

» And, most retailers are taking to Facebook for ads and Pinterest to setup online showrooms. Target and many other retailers, are using Pinterest, which Casey Carl, president of multichannel at Target says they are using for holiday-party-planning boards for their Red Card holders. Pinterest itself is starting a new “Holiday Gift” category that will not only offer shoppers gift ideas but will give retailers another display window for their items.

Walgreens: Tips for Transforming the Customer Experience

“Never in my 31 years with this company have I ever seen customer satisfaction jump like it does in these [Well] Experience stores. Customers keep telling [us] they want to stay in those stores longer, which is music to a retailer's ears.”

This quote is from Gregory D. Wasson, President and CEO of Walgreens. The company ranked 89th on this year’s InformationWeek 500, a list of the top technology innovators in the U.S and also listed as the highest-ranked company in the retail category.

Walgreens is moving away from a product-based approach and towards a fully encompassing consumer experience they call, “the Well Experience.” This new approach seeks to transform the customer experience across all of the company’s touch points, channels and formats.

“We are taking a multi-pronged approach to delivering the Well Experience. We increased engagement [between] team members and customers, and an omni-channel approach that blends our brick-and-mortar stores with e-commerce and mobile commerce. We are deliberately blurring many retail channels to fit how consumers shop today.”

» Walgreens is expanding across channels to combine physical locations with superior online experiences such as the company's acquisition of Drugstore.com which advances meeting that objective.

» They have added mobile device capabilities in the past year to include prescription refills and transfers by scanning the pill bottle; QuickPrints, an application that enables users to print photos directly from their devices to any Walgreens store; and in-store maps that allow customers to use a digital shopping list to map and locate items in a store.

» The company’s Balance Rewards loyalty program has seen more than 50 million people enroll since its introduction.

This shift is in line with ERDM findings regarding how consumers, (BtoB and BtoC) define the customer experience:

» Preferences must drive high quality personalization of communications and experiences.

» Consumers have shifted from being passive recipients of ‘push’ marketing, to selecting companies which engage, listen to, and act on, input from customers and prospects.

» Satisfaction with a product is now a given, engagement is what counts.

5 Key Takeaways

• Give customers what they want... and they will want to do business with you.
As a result of preference-based interactions, consumers are more willing to respond to communications and offers.

• Customers expect a multichannel experience.
Marketers must deliver on the expectations of improved customer experiences with consistency across every channel and point of contact.

• Be Flexible and open to change
Make customer listening part of every functional area, not just marketing. And, be flexible about acting on what you learn from customers.

• Continually monitor how your company interactions impact every customer experience
Be sure your policies and communications are in line with customer preferences… across every channel and every company department.

• Designate a Team
Establish a dedicated customer experience team to develop and execute an enterprise-wide plan to set customer experience standards and set milestones for adoption by every employee and department.