Customer Mission and Store Experience

Fully understanding one's customers, and in particular those belonging to the defined target customer groups, is the all-important challenge of successful retail marketing.

Many tools have been developed to gain knowledge about customers' purchasing behaviour, but CRI is the only method that observes all customer actions right from their entrance to the store and that delivers comprehensive, quantitative information. CRI is the only tool that combines demographic identification, shopping trip data and consumer action on an individual customer basis.

In terms of customer experience, CRI delivers :

Insight into how customers navigate

An understanding of the product selection process and selection activation

A first hand record of how buying decisions are made

An analysis of target customer groups in store, their shopping mission, browsing actions and conversion levels

An observation of the decision dynamics in particular shopper compositions (such as, for instance, mothers shopping with small children)

In combination with EPoS data or loyalty card schemes, CRI extends customer profiling and behaviour data beyond sales data and uncovers the actions and decisions leading to the purchase as well as identifying "missed purchases" (negative purchase decisions)

Promotional Effectiveness - measuring the consumer behaviour impact directly

Promotions are everywhere: over 30% of all purchases in supermarkets take place under some form of promotional support; packaged goods manufacturers spend over 50% of their total marketing budgets on promotions. For marketing managers, it is therefore absolutely crucial to understand what works, what doesn't and why.

Measuring sell-through for a single in-store promotion may be relatively straightforward, but what is the effect on the overall brand sale and from where was the promotional volume sourced? Was the sell-through rate impacted by stock availability or store arrangements? And how do parallel promotions impact each other? Are tools such as demos and sampling, shipper displays or manufacturers' free standing display units really working for the overall brand in a particular promotion?

Unlike other methods, CRI measures not just the overall outcome but the promotional purchasing process itself. By studying, with large statistical evidence, the consumer behaviour at the point-of-promotion, and following the promotional exposure, direct and objective information is gained on the impact on the effectiveness of the promotions. Reasons for underperformance can be pinpointed and corrective action be taken.

CRI delivers unbiased answers to ubiquitous questions such as:

For which consumer target group was the promotion most effective?
What was the store compliance and performance (stock, replenishing etc) regarding the promotion?
What is the impact on the competitor share?
What is the impact on direct add-on brand sales?
Was the aisle-display actually seen and browsed by a significant fraction of the shoppers?

To measure true impact, CRI allows examining a number of comparison scenarios:

Before-during-after promotion
Comparison of different stores
Same store, same time comparisons of customers exposed to the promotion versus the others.

The unparalleled depth of the CRI information allows marketers to drill down in every aspect that can impact promotional effectiveness.

Store performance and customer service optimisation

Grand marketing schemes often fail because they simply cannot be implemented effectively in store. The balance between the cost of sales, customer service staff and service levels is difficult to strike, considering customer flows that vary strongly during the day or week and with promotional activities. New store concepts aiming to create comfortable and inspiring shopping experiences go in hand with sales staff training and new service staff roles. Queue and wait times should be turned into a positive and sales-productive experience instead of a nuisance.

High performance stores and staff manage all these challenges well. Key to the success is having a tool that actually measures the store performance against defined KPIs, that identifies optimisation opportunities and helps management to focus resources on relevant corrective interventions.

CRI comprehensively measures all aspects of store performance in a variety of scenarios, be it to optimise the rollout of a new store concept or as an ongoing monitoring and feedback tool.

Are queuing or waiting times acceptable? How many potential buyers turn away because of not being served?
What is the critical time window to address an entering customer? Is it being met? Is our staff rota optimised?
Are referrals by service staff to new offers, product ranges or promotions working?
Are promotions executed properly? For instance, in terms of out-of-stock periods?
Are new concepts, such as in-store demo kiosks, improving customer traffic and conversion rate?

As CRI fully captures all consumer movements and actions, store performance data can be analysed from a variety of angles and depending on a variety of parameters.

Customer queue or wait times
Staff availability to customer interaction
Staff interaction impact on browsing and conversion
Referral efficiency to new products and promotions
Impact of product unavailability

Store layout and retail stock placement

For retailers large and small, retail floor space is a very expensive and precious resource. Negotiations between brand manufacturers and retailers about the value of a specific floor space or fixture location are usually hard ones. Accurate floor planning will increase store productivity.

Far beyond simple footfall counting, CRI's behavioural analysis provides factual data and insight about effective floor space usage and stock placement. For retailers and manufacturers, it answers questions like:

What are the customer routes through store of the highest revenue customers?
How do those "ant tracks" vary as a function of customer parameters?
Instead of just experimenting with stock rotation, new fixtures or product line space allocation, can we see and measure the effect of stock placement changes directly?
Where are the famous product affinities and do they work in our store?
What is the leverage of our gondola end fixture on the overall brand sales in the store?
What are our hot spots and where is floor space under-exploited?
Do we have the right balance between traffic generation with high-demand products and customer convenience?

When helping retailers and manufacturers to optimise store layout and retail stock placement, CRI employs tools such as:

Interactive "heat map" and traffic flow analysis; not just on a total count level, but as a function of, for instance, demographics, conversion, or specific product browsing.
"Time spent" and customer density analysis, identifying not just where customers walked but what time they spend at a particular section or fixture
Traffic routes and their variations
Change impact analysis, showing the net effect of fixture changes, stock rotation or changes to the floor layout.

The unparalleled depth of the CRI information allows marketers to drill down into every parameter and correlation that will optimise store layout & retail stock placement.

Case Studies and References

A home entertainment retailer has used CRI to analyse customer demographics and behaviour in a problematic, underperforming store. Capturing and analysing customer traffic over two weeks, the project identified specific customer groups and their buying patternsm and enabled the company to develop a package of targeted measures to better meet requirements of their most profitable customers, to optimise the layout, to manage busy periods with the correct number of staff and, ultimately, to increase store turnover.
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Together with a specialist consultancy firm in the magazine distrubution sector, VentureAxis uses CRI to analyse consumer behaviour when browsing and selecting magazines and newspapers. This enabled, for the first time, detailed information to be gathered on the buying behaviour and habits of consumers in this area. The results allow decisions to be made regarding the positioning of items on shelving units to optimise cross selling of both magazines and confectionary, reduction in returns, and the ability to target the ranges stocked to the store demographic. In addition, detailed information on the effect of "bagging" magazines on purchasing behaviour enables publishers and distributers to make the key decision of which magazines should be bagged.
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