Overview
Escalate Clienteling combines the advanced technology of Escalate Relationship Marketing with a robust client book and product information repository to create a tool that institutionalizes best sales and service practices throughout your organization and dramatically expands the reach and effectiveness of sales professionals. Deployed in a thin-client model and with open integration standards for POS applications, Escalate Clienteling can be rolled out quickly with minimal training and immediately begin turbo-charging your associates' performance.
Escalate Clienteling empowers your sales associates to become exceptional brand ambassadors for your stores through assisting them in providing outstanding service to your most valued customers. Associates who previously struggled to stay on top of several dozen personal customers will find that their practical scope has been expanded ten-fold by the introduction of intelligent technology that monitors both their customer's activity as well as the retail environment itself. As an added bonus, the details on these most valued customers are now stored centrally and will not walk out the door when an employee leaves.
The application begins with a robust and extensible customer profile that captures all relevant demographic, lifestyle and preference information in a standard format to ease later retrieval. The customer's full purchase history is automatically stored in a “virtual closet” including product image, transaction date and purchase location as well as recommended complementary items. Any communications with the customer, whether by phone, appt, web visit, e-mail or letter are filed for a clear audit trail on interactions with the retail organization. A personal calendar is maintained with appointments with customers and other employees as well as automatic reminders of store and company events including pre-event activities.
One of the most powerful features in Escalate Clienteling lies in the “tasks” created for the associate by Escalate Relationship Marketing. This real-time engine constantly monitors customer behavior and retail activities to push to an associate's desktop the most productive activities he should pursue that day to foster loyalty and drive sales within his Client Book. One of our most successful customers refers to his associate's home page as his “blueprint for success” because it has been demonstrably proven that the associates who consistently execute on the recommendations from Escalate Clienteling significantly outperform all other associates in both sales per hour as well as customer satisfaction.
Escalate Clienteling includes round-trip analytics that allow both store and corporate management to constantly refine the rules that drive recommendations for associates as they evaluate the effectiveness of trial initiatives. Over time, the best practices of the standout sales people become institutionalized through the use of the Clienteling application and overall customer satisfaction reflects the new benchmark.
Overview
Escalate Clienteling combines the advanced technology of Escalate Relationship Marketing with a robust client book and product information repository to create a tool that institutionalizes best sales and service practices throughout your organization and dramatically expands the reach and effectiveness of sales professionals. Deployed in a thin-client model and with open integration standards for POS applications, Escalate Clienteling can be rolled out quickly with minimal training and immediately begin turbo-charging your associates' performance.
Escalate Clienteling empowers your sales associates to become exceptional brand ambassadors for your stores through assisting them in providing outstanding service to your most valued customers. Associates who previously struggled to stay on top of several dozen personal customers will find that their practical scope has been expanded ten-fold by the introduction of intelligent technology that monitors both their customer's activity as well as the retail environment itself. As an added bonus, the details on these most valued customers are now stored centrally and will not walk out the door when an employee leaves.
The application begins with a robust and extensible customer profile that captures all relevant demographic, lifestyle and preference information in a standard format to ease later retrieval. The customer's full purchase history is automatically stored in a “virtual closet” including product image, transaction date and purchase location as well as recommended complementary items. Any communications with the customer, whether by phone, appt, web visit, e-mail or letter are filed for a clear audit trail on interactions with the retail organization. A personal calendar is maintained with appointments with customers and other employees as well as automatic reminders of store and company events including pre-event activities.
One of the most powerful features in Escalate Clienteling lies in the “tasks” created for the associate by Escalate Relationship Marketing. This real-time engine constantly monitors customer behavior and retail activities to push to an associate's desktop the most productive activities he should pursue that day to foster loyalty and drive sales within his Client Book. One of our most successful customers refers to his associate's home page as his “blueprint for success” because it has been demonstrably proven that the associates who consistently execute on the recommendations from Escalate Clienteling significantly outperform all other associates in both sales per hour as well as customer satisfaction.
Escalate Clienteling includes round-trip analytics that allow both store and corporate management to constantly refine the rules that drive recommendations for associates as they evaluate the effectiveness of trial initiatives. Over time, the best practices of the standout sales people become institutionalized through the use of the Clienteling application and overall customer satisfaction reflects the new benchmark.
Associate Home Page
The associate home page provides a convenient launching vehicle for most of his daily activity. Along the left panel is timely communications from the home or regional office as well as event details, training materials and merchandise highlights. This content is refreshed as frequently as desired by the marketing and store management.
Typically, retailers have also chosen to display flash sales data, highlighting associate, department, store and region performance. This choice, along with virtually all other design elements of the home page are completely customizable by the individual retailer and may even vary by locale or store format. Designed to work with touch screen, mouse or keyboard, navigation is intuitive and most associates are up and running within a matter of hours of their first exposure to the application.
The heart of the home page is the associate tasks or recommended actions. These tasks are a combination of system created recommendations from Escalate Relationship Marketing, manually entered reminders or requests from store personnel and activities posted directly from integrated third-party applications like Purchasing or Work Force Automation.
Tasks fall into three main categories:
SALES OPTIMIZATION
- Call customer A about his upcoming anniversary. His wife has a wish list.
- New Merchandise arrived of high affinity for Customer B. Edit and send attached e-mail.
- E-mail sent to Customer C regarding Trunk Show. Follow-up with call.
SERVICE
- Alterations arrived for Customer D
- Send Thank You note for recent purchase from Customer E
- PickUpInStore request from Customer F
- Customer G birthday this Thursday
OPERATIONS
- Merchandise men's accessories for Fall assortment
- PO arriving today for cosmetics
- Cycle Count Aisle K
Compliance on completing these tasks is maintained for each associate and store manager's can view reports on effectiveness of individual associates as well as overall initiatives.
Benefits
- Improved effectiveness of associate in generating new sales activity
- Improved visibility into service and operational needs
- Significant expansion of associate's ability to deliver personalized service to a broad audience
- Foster customer loyalty by reinforcing associate / customer communication and relationship
Features
- Sales, Service and Operational Tasks supported in automated and manual modes
- Real-Time display of sales activity for associate and retailer
- Intuitive user interface that is comfortable and inviting for a range of associate comforts with technology
- Maintain multiple customer profile sessions in tabs while re-visiting the home page throughout the day
- Regulate task volume by projected store volume so associates receive an appropriate level of off-floor activity for a given sales day
Client Book
Working in concert with existing retail customer databases where appropriate, Escalate Clienteling provides a robust and extensible profile on all customers within an associate's client book.
The customer record is fully extensible and dependent upon the retailer's needs. Size and brand preferences, birthdays and anniversaries, seasonal home addresses and lifestyle interests are all easily accommodated by the flexible data model.
When searching for a customer, Escalate Clienteling can first look in an associate's book, then in all associate's books and finally access an enterprise customer repository when one exists. Depending upon retail format and focus, an individual client book may contain anywhere from 25 to 2000 customer records with varying degrees of detail profile data.
Customers can be added by an associate manually or automatically populated based upon purchase and associate history. Store managers maintain ultimate control on moving customers between associates and may review new customer/associate recommendations prior to accepting a customer into an associate's book. Some retailers may choose to not assign customers to associates at all but maintain only store-level associations. In any event, every associate has access to customer information to ensure that customer needs are met regardless of who is working that day.
A full history of a customer's purchase history is stored in their “virtual closet”. Depending upon retail vertical, this may be referred to as the "virtual home", "virtual jewelry box", etc.
Benefits
- Provide associates with real-time access and management of client profiles
- Significantly increase number of active clientele per associate
- Associates can make compelling purchase recommendations to customers based on their purchase history or preferences
- Retailer maintains permanent, current record of customer profile
- Foster loyalty through demonstrating awareness of customer's interests, activities and dates
Features
- Search by any relevant field in customer record
- Fully extensible customer profile for storing all forms of data
- Opt-in credit card number storage to simplify phone consultations
- Allow customers to access their profile and update directly from website
- Visibility to replenishment opportunities
- Interoperability with retailer enterprise customer repository or 3rd party phone number lookup
- Gift Registry and Wish List visibility and management ( with optional Escalate Gift Registry application )
Sales Optimization
The retail sales force historically has had to suffer with the least sophisticated tools to ply their craft relying mainly on their own personal product and customer knowledge. Escalate Clienteling represents a major step forward in empowering the sales associate to effectively improve their effectiveness. Combining a customer profile and history repository with an understanding of retail events and applying the power of Escalate Relationship Marketing, the associate is provided with powerful assistance in how they can maximize their sales/hour.
The Relationship Marketing Engine is constantly monitoring the events and customers to determine the highest impact communication or activity that an associate can take to drive sales.
Marketing and Store Operations management combine to define the logical events that should trigger activity on the part of a sales associate. These are a combination of sales, service and operational activities that most effectively use the workforce asset.
Escalate Relationship Marketing provides a visual design tool for business users to develop multi-step dialogs that will drive associate activity. Examples of dialogs that would result in an associate task include – upcoming birthdays/anniversaries, new merchandise receipts, lapsed customer patterns, new customer activity, etc.
Example Marketing Event
A marketing event dialog can inform your sales associates of upcoming marketing events and send follow-up notices to call particular customers that might be interested in the event. By delivering marketing events to a sales associate's Clienteling desktop, the associate has immediate access to information about the event. Audiences could be targeted for each event based on their profiles. In the dialog below, information is sent to the sales associate's clienteling desktop and then followed up one week later with a reminder for the target audience.
Marketing Event Dialog
n addition to tasks sent to the associate's desktop, the associate themselves have the ability to conduct their own queries, campaigns and communications. Intuitive “select” screens allow associates to extract their customers most likely to respond to a specific offer and then either print a call list, automatically send them an e-mail with a website link or request printed collateral.
These same campaigns can be “pushed” from either corporate marketing or a store manager and appear on an associates home page as a pre-packaged initiative for his follow-thru.
- Increase Associate Sales Productivity
Automatically suggest high priority associate activities to maximize their effectiveness in contacting and serving clients
- Increase Revenue Per Client
Increase frequency of client store visits and purchase size per visit
- Improve Margins
» Automatically suggest high margin products for each client based on their past behavior and purchases
» Suggest items early in season to sell at full price
- Minimize Customer Attrition and Foster Loyalty
» Provide relevant, high value communications with clients to drive loyalty
» Maintain centralized control of customer profiles
» Reassign clients with associate turnover
Features
- Browser-based access at POS, kiosk or PC
- Compatible with PDA deployment
- Event-triggered actions to sales associates
- Drive sales associate activities based on best practices from store, region and corporate
- Follow-up associate reminders to suggest phone calls, email or direct mail
- Associate-driven list creation for personal campaigns
- Robust dialogs allow A/B testing, pilot roll-outs, multi-step cross-channel decision-making
- Synchronization of retail events across collateral, training and promotional activity
- Tracking of associate compliance and effectiveness for coaching
Customer Orders
For the retailer who wishes to enable Pick-Up-In-Store, Ship-From-Store or Endless Aisle ( special orders ), Clienteling provides a full order capture and service functionality as an optional component of Clienteling. This capability is provided through thin-client access to the underlying Customer Interaction Engine which also is the foundation for Escalate e-Commerce and Escalate Contact Center applications ensuring a consistent user experience regardless of channel.
Customers ordering on the web or through the call center are automatically available in the Clienteling application. Associates can initiate new special orders or query on the status of existing orders through the same interface as they use for Clienteling.
With the implementation of Escalate Order Management, additional functionality is enabled within Clienteling including the ability to support Pick-Up-In-Store or Ship-From-Store. Tasks are automatically created and sent to an associate's home page to pick these orders and visibility is provided into a queue of existing orders and their status. Collateral including shipping labels and packing slips can be produced on any standard printer once an order is selected for picking.
Integration to other commerce engines or order management systems is facilitated by a services-based Java architecture allowing Escalate Clienteling to be the consistent UI for all customer-based activity within the store regardless of back-end systems currently deployed. An open API is also available for integration with existing POS environments.
Benefits
- Capture lost store sales through special orders or reserving items for pick-up in another store
- Increase online sales by capturing web shoppers looking for a pick-up-in-store option
- Reduce inventory costs by drop-shipping low volume items without sacrificing selection
- Increase fill rate by shipping back-ordered items directly from stores with excess inventory
Features
- Consistent pricing/promotion logic regardless of channel
- Single customer record across the retail enterprise
- Branded collateral and carrier indicia printed in store
- Order capture, returns and order inquiries through Clienteling UI
- Support for Endless Aisle, Pickup in Store, Ship From Store
- Combine ship-to-home, pick-up-in-store on single order
- Supports buy-on-line or pay-in-store models
- Escalation and re-routing for orders where item is not available
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