How to grow e-commerce without harming the store network? Retail brands present on both distribution channels are undoubtedly constantly seeking to solve this equation.
The solution may lie in enriching the in-store experience to bring physical and digital sales closer together. And data is a major lever for action in retail, as pointed out by Sophie Gallay, Data and Operational Excellence Director at Etam, during the Data & IA Hub.
Data everywhere in retail, and also in stores
“At Etam, as with most major retailers, Data is central to a large number of projects: upstream of the chain on sourcing, production or logistics, but also downstream, for example on the optimization of in-store merchandising”, she illustrates.
However, these projects primarily concern head office teams and the conduct of operations. However, the exploitation of data also allows use cases in the field, with the population of in-store hosts.
European leader in lingerie, Etam makes customer support a key element of its commercial proposal. “It was therefore essential for us to have a data use case linked to the customer experience in the store” and to the service of the sales teams.
Two other arguments motivated this project to develop a mobile application, AppMag, intended for sellers and presented as Etam’s data-driven clienteling application. For the brand, the unification of data is an imperative in an omnichannel approach.
A competitive advantage for the network
In store or online, the customer “must find the same level of interaction, the same personalization capabilities, the same advice… in short, an equivalent end-to-end experience”, says the Data director.
This recognizes that e-commerce has advantages over these actions and use cases, generating “a lag” in terms of customer experience. By providing operational data to stores, the ambition “was therefore to restore the competitive advantage that Data represents” to sellers.
The AppMag, accessible from the cash desk and on advisers’ mobile terminals, provides employees with data from multiple sources in real time, but also in batches. The application is referred to as a “data-driven right arm.”
To perform this function, AppMag is connected to “all Etam applications”, and in particular ERP, CRM, e-commerce databases, PLM, etc. Sellers access product and inventory data, as well as customer information. This includes e-commerce pages that a customer has spent a lot of time on.
A ‘data-driven right arm’
The customer data “allows the sales hostess to have immediate access to a precise vision of the customer’s centers of interest, of his past or current purchases”, ie his wishlist and his basket, explains Sophie Gallay. To increase the seller, the application also embeds recommendation modules.
More “rare” features for this population, but which are widely adopted: analytics. “Our ambition was to empower them, allow them to challenge themselves and track their performance.”
Each salesperson benefits from his own dashboard which he accesses via a personal identifier. And to improve their results and make decisions, everyone has access to data from nearby shops, such as top sales.
100% of the group’s store network is equipped. From 50 to 70% of collections are made via AppMag, with time savings of around 30%. Etam also measures an improvement in employee and customer NPS enabled by the application.