Retail CRM that really works for the Post COVID-19 World

The relationship would mean everything to be the best salesperson in the Post COVID-19 world & how to make it really work for the Store Staff & Managers

I am the Co-founder and Senior Product Manager of a Retail Tech company that caters to the Small and Medium Specialty Store. We have built a suite of Products which retails to save operating costs, Sustain and Grow on a longer their business. This article is about retail CRM Shophub and how it matters more post this crisis.

Our CRM caters to a specialty retail store, which is a retail store that focuses on specific product categories, as opposed to retailers who sell a large number of consumer goods categories. Shophub can be used by stores that were selling Optical, Footwear, Apparels, Cosmetics, watches and much more.

Why Another CRM! there is enough of it

Salesforce dominated the worldwide CRM market with a 19.5% market share in 2018, over double its nearest rival, SAP, at 8.3% share. And all the big CRM players like salesforce are catering to Big and chain Retails

Usually, the retail CRM market is coupled by POS Players as its a strong industry belief that relationship starts off with handshake Point of Sale. Though the CRM market is super crowded, But I think there is a reason why all of this CRM software exists. All of them have different factors in terms of features, the audience they cater to, pricing and use cases. So we took the time to find the differentiator in our audience and their problems

After hustling in the market for more than one year what we had realized is the Retail Software market is a Slow growth market compared to other SMB SaaS Products catering to IT companies, mainly because you have to rely upon onfield sales and not just on Digital Marketing to acquire and service the customers. Even if the sales are done one Call there would be a need for an on-field visit for the onboarding & support.

100s of tech-savvy CRM are not gonna work anymore for the retailer

This practice not only kills the software companies' sales & support time but it turns slows down the growth. On the Same Page, a Retail to has to spend 240 hours per employee per year on learning these tools to get them organized

Out of Market Research, conducted on 200 Retail on target segments, We unearthed strong insights that would make Customer Relationship Management really meaningful which we have translated into our CRM. Along with it, we find COVID-19 lockdown to impact everything in and around retail business, from consumer behavior, the way supply chain operates, the way retail interacts with customers, to how retail marketing just being disrupted. All being said I would like to take you into our data journey story which we had for the last 2 years with our real customers

1 Centralized vs Decentralised Communication

Even 75 % of retailers beviled that offline and online customer engagement is a clear path to success

The segment we catered to where the small and medium- Retails.
most of them are single stores and for them, Marketing is a gibirsh. Right from Brouchers to Banner to Digital Marketing they don’t really focus attention, rather they spend time on the store activies

In General, we found out these B and C retailers which had occupied around 30 to 40 % of the overall retail size and average walk-ins of 3–4 per day and 8–10 in terms of Fashion.

The Existing CRMs in the market were all focused on the Larger chain with the marketing being done by a centralized marketing team sitting on the Corporate office. The Larger chain usually has larger walk-ins and the storefront salespeople are just Point of sales and data capturing agents of choice. On the contrary, the Single stores are run by the owners themselves or a trusted store manager and they try to be great is customer service. Their attempt to using these big tools or outsourcing marketing goes in vain as most of the digital agencies are not in connection with the end customer, whereas the End store Staff or the Manager talks to the customer to understands their needs and builds a rapport which is not translated into communications

In Shophub CRM, the customer data is captured and utilized from the store from so that the communication channels are maintained on a store level

In the Post COVID world where the relationship is everything that is going to matter

As the COVID-19 crisis begins to ease, it’s likely consumers will use discretion when choosing which stores to physically visit. Post the Pandemic, Retailer Association predicts at least 7 Days for Optical Customers to return and Minimum 15 days for Apparels, Fashion, Cosmetics, Shoes, and Belts consumers to return and 1 month at least for the sales to pump up. As most of the consumers will be sticking to basics such as groceries and Medical, for them to think about fashion or any other ancillary goods will take time. Retailers offering offers and online-pickup-in-store or curbside capabilities are likely to have sales rebound earlier than those without. At the same time, Customers are gonna walk-in will be based on existing relationships and not some direct and indirect promotion. So it's best to keep the marketing activities tied up and to decentralized to the storefront where there is enough knowledge, more human connection.

Shophub leverages the Knowledge of a store salesmen Coupled with sesonsed sesasonded Marketing Campagin Plan . Data + Right Targetting which is will do wonders

2 Mobile is changing the world so is Mobile CRM

It’s very evident that mobile CRM companies are doing good, but with COVID-19 lockdown around the world there has been a spike in mobile adaption, and which is gonna change everything. More and More people including Store Staffs are active and have adapted to Whatsapp and Facebook on the fullest potential, as all the major social media have reported a spike in usage. Added to it, one really doesn’t need hours of training to learn how to manage relationships so should be the CRM Softwares. The research found that 65 % of Mobile CRM users achieved sales targets than without a mobile CRM

Our Target Personas are Mobile People

As you can see our of market research what we had found out is more than 95 % store owners, Managers and staff use Whatapp and mobile rater than in a geeky CRM software

Almost 30 % of the small-medium people don't own a computer and android mobiles are everywhere and cheap and better way to make people use it

As the 230 hours are spent on training is gonna come at least 50 % with mobile CRM as there is a limitation of screen space and staff are more used to mobile than a computer interface with a lot of hanging items and a lot to learn in term of feature

Shophub CRM is 100 % mobile First CRM which has all of its features on mobile. Our app interface more or less resembled the Whatapp or Facebook as our target audience were accustomed to it

Shophub mobile First CRM which is not only accessible but also easly usable by any first time users

3 Democratizing the Customer Experince on par with the online players

When consumers do return to the stores en masse, they will bring with them the online wish-lists, online transaction history, and product preferences curated from their participation in the stay-at-home economy. Equipping the store associates with the tools necessary to augment the in-store experience with this data will further differentiate your brand in the recovery.

Most of the Small and Medium Players were Battling and continue to battle Over Competition and hyper-local big players and walk-ins being diverted through online players

As you can see there is a huge difference between online and offline experience

Local players lack the awareness of what takes them to compete with online players in terms of experince and mainly are bored of digital agencies taking them to ride for promising walk-ins and online listing sites also fail to keep up their expectations after huge investments

Shophub allows the retailer to

Our CRM not only allows CRM to stay organized by also help them support, engage them and promote a product

Retailers who are using shophub automatically get enrolled in Google Maps and Nearby listing, with our Ai powered algorithm, helps customer discover shops which are nearby

We also have Whatapp, SMS and automation platform which allows retailers
to constantly communicate with customers on a regular basis

Retails can leverage google maps, Whatapp SMS and other frugal marketing using Shophub CRM which will help them to provide a great offline online experince to the customer

Shophub allows Retailers to do Omni-Channe l marketing like a Pro upgrading them to the next level

5. To the Era of Whatapp & Personalised Marketing

WeChat has been the go-to app for daily life and business in China it’s surrounding countries. It’s estimated that more than 30% of all internet traffic in China is through WeChat, and in 2017 they introduced “mini-programs,” which allowed businesses to build apps on top of WeChat. One has never to download any apps or go to a browser to access millions of services and businesses in WeChat. On our Target demographics like Southeast Asia, Europe and India WhatsApp is the dominant social platform and, while it has not built the same infrastructure for building apps, there are many startups like ours who have found a way around that and now run many services on top of WhatsApp. We are not mobile-first, but they are also WhatsApp-first CRM.

There are around 500 million active users in Whatapp on a daily basis until 2019 Q1

These SMS have open rates of less than 1% and conversion is less than .5 %

Currently, retail including the larger one does bulk SMS and Email Campaigns which are largely ignored by the customer. Few Optical stores even go to the extent of adapting traditional physical courier to the customers.

What we have in our kitty is much more rewarding

Shophub CRM allows customers to be segmented and classified and targetted with personalized messages hand tailed to each customer needs

72% of consumers will only engage with personalized marketing messages

80% of self-classified frequent shoppers will only shop with brands who personalize their experience

According to a Harvard Business Review, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 95%. Personalized marketing is one tool that can help marketers retain customers.

Our Campaigns work on top of Whatsapp and SMS and our campaigns know what message to send at what time to what kind of user. You don't have to note down in dairy if your customer has a birthday or if your VIP customer can avail of a special discount for one-year completion. Our Growth Management system automatically triggers reminders for a store manager to manage his customer lifecycle and make them happier.

We have also tied up with the brand to target customers directly from the retailer's hand to discover more offers and discounts

Shophub Personliased Campaigns will enpower retailer to target right customers at right time with right messaging with right prodcuts of customers choice

Conclusion

For the Indian region, we were able to fix the price pointers through the surveys

Retail Was supposed to hit 1.5 Trillion in UK, India & Europe all combined
But the Q1 of 2020 was hit by Corona Pandamic Added to retail is hitting the bottom of the sales. Brands said sales have fallen by as much as 70% since fears over the virus intensified starting earlier this month. It is true that it is going to be a tough 12–18 months for specialty retail all around the world, but it is also true that it high time retail innovates itself to stay organized and be more creative in terms of customer-centric and adopt new technologies as change is inevitable