RetailDetail Congress: “Customer experience touches the heart of your organisation”

How to ensure your customers can order as quickly as possible while maximising their shopping basket? How to counter shoplifting without scaring customers away? All these questions can be answered from insights, usually scattered across many different systems, that Mastercard can help leverage.

The core of the retail system

Paying for a purchase may be considered a final step, compulsory and somehow administrative, rewarding a successful customer journey. It is actually an integral part of the customer journey with a lot of interdependencies. The payment can derive insights that could be leveraged from the beginning of the journey and can conversely be fuelled by the other steps to be even more transformational.

All this insight can even be activated in real time, for live personalization for example. As Mastercard is at the centre of the retail ecosystem, the company focuses on the solutions to support retailers and consumers – beyond the transaction. It delivers the technology and insights capabilities to help retailers innovate, grow, and stay ahead of the competition in today’s digital world. At the RetailDetail Congress on 25 April, Geoffrey Gasq, VP Business Development Data & Services for Mastercard in Western Europe will show how retailers, large and small, can use insights to optimize the customer journey.

Breaking silos

Customer journeys themselves have also become more sophisticated. People do their research online, yet they might buy in-store. As a result, retailers really need to invest in their cross-channel strategy. But how do you ensure the same level of service and experience across these different channels? According to Mastercard, it is imperial to break down the silos between e-commerce and brick-and-mortar.

Customer experience goes to the heart of an organisation: how can companies break down the silos between the IT teams and the marketing teams, which need more flexibility to experiment without having to overload IT roadmaps? It’s also a matter of operational agility. Marketing technologies have grown over the past few years, and retailers are still exploring how to make most of them, from an end-to-end perspective.

For example, with Mastercard’s Dynamic Yield platform, retailers can better understand their audiences and try to personalise interactions – both online and in-store. Even loyalty programmes can become more experience-based by using the right insights. Finally, generative AI presents opportunities to collect, interpret and experiment with unstructured data like no other.

Even shrinkage is a trade-off

However diverse Mastercard’s customers are, the big questions remain the same across retail: “how do I make sure I have the right product assortment in relation to all context variables, on a local level or more globally compared to the competition? Or how do I better manage returns?” The fact that returns are virtually non-existent in the physical world but reach up to 20% online creates logistical difficulties for merchants.

At the same time, fraud is also on the rise. Thay is why Mastercard also helped companies make the right choices to reduce shrinkage. In terms of security, technology choices can of course be made, such as installing cameras or vaults to protect certain types of goods, but this will impact other KPIs, such as customer experience, checkout times, etc. It’s a deliberate trade-off every organisation must make.

The future is hybrid

Perhaps the future belongs mainly to hybrid retail models, not fully but partially automated. As opposed to Amazon, who was rather (over-)ambitious with its Just Walk Out technology, other players look at checkout-free technology more from niche angles, for example a compact convenience store with a smaller range but with much wider opening hours.

Moreover, retailers should not shorten lead times too much either, because people do need to take some time to consider the different choices. Even at self-service kiosks there can be an element of personalisation by considering the context. How does one reconcile a fast turnaround time with the ambition to increase the basket size? Insights help find the sweet spot.

Even sales associates benefit from hybridisation. Human advice is highly valued, so it is great if employees can also consult stocks or see a personal customer file. In fact, human contact is digitising. As POS systems become more sophisticated and more open to external services, a huge range of possibilities opens up, but few are ready to use them yet. Therefore, the crucial next step is to aggregate all the insights and activate it in real time on the right channel.

It is a task no one can do alone: Mastercard expects companies to move towards a more open data architecture, where different partners take care of certain parts of the value chain. Mastercard sees itself playing the role of orchestrator: having a network culture, the company loves to connect an entire ecosystem.

At the RetailDetail Congress this Thursday, in addition to Mastercard’s insights, you can expect keynotes from Average Rob, Jysk, Gino Van Ossel, Thrive Beer, The Good Roll and many more!