Blog

Disruption in Retail: Customer Relationship Management Intersects the Internet of Things

February 13, 2018

We are living in the breakout period of big data and the proof is all around us. Every day the digital devices we interact with become smarter and more personalized, improving how they anticipate our needs and desires. The technology leap of utilizing unimaginable amounts of data has modified consumer behavior; customers expect interactions with brands to be as natural and intelligent as the interactions with their phones and apps.

The challenge and opportunity are immense. Retailers’ assets include supply chains, physical stores, ecommerce, mobile commerce, and marketing channels. Retailers’ headwinds include changing consumer expectations, market disruption, legacy technology, and financial pressure. There has been a rapid upheaval of the old world order in retail as giants have fallen and nimble players have quickly stepped up to fill the vacuum.

Competing starts with understanding your customer and responding to their needs. In today’s vastly connected world this concept translates to opening the spigots of data from digital endpoints and using it to obtain knowledge and improve the customer experience. This requires brands to place bets on technologies at various degrees of market adoption.

At SessionM, we believe a fundamental element to modern brand-consumer interactions is the customer data and engagement platform. Customer engagement can flow into such a platform from any digital source, update models, and trigger response engagements in real time. This unlocks a world where brands can interact with their customers across channels in the moment. For example, a customer walks into a store and is greeted by an associate who knows their product preferences. Content is streamed to the customer’s phone based on where they are in the store and their past shopping experiences. Follow up emails tie these experiences together and maintain the relationship between visits. Ecommerce and mobile commerce that personalizes based on cross channel interactions. Having a customer data and engagement platform ties all of these experiences together and creates more meaningful relationships between a brand and their consumers.

Putting in place this fundamental element of customer data and engagement, a brand can “turn on” and “turn off” engagement channels. This provides brands with a way of tying together customer cross-channel interactions while testing new technologies and responding to customer behavior.

On top of this, SessionM measures Key Performance Indicators to determine the impact of a particular program, channel, or campaign. Brands can make intelligent decisions more easily about which bets are paying the highest dividends by testing and reviewing results to KPIs within customer segments. This insight is crucial to surviving and thriving in today’s market.

SessionM is elevating brands to compete with a focus on customer relationships through better engagement and brand loyalty. Baked into the platform are tools to build rewards and promotions, which are targeted towards customers based on past behavior. These incentives become more personalized over time, as the platform learns from the individual consumer, the consumer group segment, and the broader brand consumer population. This leads to stronger affinities as the brand begins to build and strengthen a 1:1 relationship with the consumer.

The challenge and opportunity facing industries is as daunting as it is exciting. SessionM provides the experience and the technology to enable brands that seek to leapfrog their technology for better customer engagements at scale.