From the eyes of your millennial customer (1/4): Increasing Brand Recognition

This article is the first of a four part series about millennial customers’ expectations for Retail. Each article discusses an expectation and offers recommendations for aligning your business and IT strategy to meet the desires of your customers using Salesforce. Each customer experience topic is supported by research by Gartner and Forbes. Stay tuned to read the other blogs!

The reality is that millennials have higher value expectations for brand products, where they expect more in return or otherwise they will purchase a generic product (Big Eye Agency). My aim is to improve the end-to-end customer journey from Marketing to Sales to Service and so forth for retail brands.

Why? Because digital has the power to create remarkable moments and raise our customer satisfaction. At the end of the day, I would rather stick with a brand that consistently meets my needs than go looking for something new.

Expectation 1: Consistent Brand Recognition

As a millennial customer, we want your brand to resonate and to meet us where we hang out both digitally and in the real world. Every employee is a representative of your brand, so they need to be empowered to represent you.

The benefit of consistent branding online and offline is your brand is distinguished from other competing brands. Nike does not just want to beat out its closest competitor, Adidas. They are on a mission to “bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world” (About.Nike.Com). Since their mission relates more than a typical revenue statement, Nike has some of the most loyal millennial customers in sportswear.

Nike is constantly thinking of new ways to increase their customer experience, by measuring more than NPS and CSAT. They hire innovative professionals for Nike Digital to uncover further customer insights so they can “serve consumers more directly and personally” (Nike Careers).

Using customer insights on your campaigns and by interacting online / offline with your customers, you can test how well your brand resonates with millennials. Millennials are eager to share their feedback, you just need to invite them to the conversation. The reality is that digital has transformed Retail into hyper drive, which means you need the right technology to tailor your message to your customer.

Most companies I have partnered with still do not have a clear picture of their customer profile. So, this is where to get started. You can create a 360 View of your Customer by connecting your data sources across your business using Salesforce. Easier said than done, right?

Take for example, Sam’s Customer Journey indicated in the following journey map:

As Lance Santin at Salesforce discusses unifying customer ‘identities’ is challenging and the customer journey is complex (“Unlock Customer Data with Salesforce Customer 360”). Sam’s customer data is located in this case between Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, and Commerce Cloud. Dependent on the stage of her journey Sam can either be ‘unknown’ when clicking on an ad and browsing the online store or ‘known’ from the point she decides to accept an electronic receipt for her guest checkout purchase. She receives an opt-in email and decides to receive promotional messages in order to receive further discounts, so over time, we learn more and more about Sam and her preferences. Salesforce can be the single system of record for Sam’s interactions with our brand and our ambassadors. For example, on her next purchase she interacts with a Customer Service agent who learns that Sam is not only a B2C customer but also owns Mystyle.com, a website that sells products to her own customer base. An opportunity is now opened for our B2B Sales Team to ensure Sam’s future buying needs are met.

What Customer 360 enables you to do is to connect your customer views using a unified ID. The result is holistic order history, case history, and marketing responses.

Before enabling Salesforce 360, you need to understand which departments within your organization interact with your customers either directly or indirectly. Here’s where I can help. Most likely, this will include your Marketing, Supply Chain: Logistics, Customer Service, Finance, and Store Associates. As a visionary in your organization, start asking the questions: “What are you noticing about our customers this quarter?” and see what types of answers you receive. The view of your customer may be unclear.

After your connect your customer data across platforms, you can begin to analyze and create data-driven segments. You can tailor your campaigns to customer’s wants and needs. But it does not end there – you now have the ability to consistently update and adapt your strategy based on what your customer tells you through: reacting to your posts on social media, returning products to yoru warehouse, expressing themselves to your service agents, asking for a refund, and interacting within your brand ambassadors in your stores.

The reality is that not all customers will give you the feedback you want directly in order to generate more revenue. When was the last time someone called you and said, “You should really consider sponsoring an Adult League in Amsterdam to support loyal athletes so they continue to engage with your brand and buy more sneakers”? But if we pull back the data layer, we can see this picture:

• Who our customer is – a 30 year old man who just started building his own family
• What he does –  hanging out with his brother and father on his night off from work
• Where he lives – living in Amsterdam with his partner and new child
• How he uses your sneakers – reminiscing about old times, thinking about how receiving a new pair of kicks was a special gift, and relaxing over a game of basketball
• Why he loves your sneakers – they were dad’s way of showing love and support

With this picture now in focus, we can begin to envision ways to not just to meet this customer’s needs, but to exceed them. We can invite him to purchase his child’s first pair of matching shoes, we can offer him a percentage off a gift pair of shoes for his dad, or we can even sponsor his local basketball league to show him that we love him as much as he loves us.

Here are some ways we can partner with you to achieve this vision: Customer Experience Discovery Offering, Implementation, Change Management

Want to learn more about how we can partner to bring your customer to the forefront of your business?

Send me a note!
Nalani Kopp.

More on Salesforce Learn more about the Capgemini Salesforce partnership and our Salesforce practice Register for our Salesforce Winter release ’20 event!