Successful mobile retail apps

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Design an app, build it, launch it to market and tell your customers about it. Sounds easy, right? Well yes, if you apply the magic formula.

Effective mobile retailing is much more complex than just building an app. It’s the specific blend of understanding individual customers, recognising the retail environment as a dynamic landscape, retaining a business focus to achieve commercial goals, and pushing technical boundaries, that gives retail apps a je ne sais quoi that translates into increased sales, customer retention and increased engagement - language that all of us can certainly understand!

However cutting-edge this may sound, it’s really an age old approach - blending specific expertise and tools to deliver great customer experience - that remains at the core of retail. It often seems forgotten when dealing with mobile and yet, its applicability has not diminished, it is simply evolving for hyper-connected digitally enabled consumers.

Lessons from intelligent bricks and mortar retailing

Considering an in store team - specifically Personal and Mystery Shoppers - and integrating their duties into a technical and business skill set, we are close to identifying what is required to deliver a truly effective mobile application.

Retailers employ in store teams with complex skill sets to maintain high quality customer experiences. While Personal Shoppers tend to shoppers’ wants and work relentlessly toward sales targets, Mystery Shoppers take care of shoppers’ expectations, ensuring that visitors are satisfied and the service, seamless.

Personal Shoppers create a personalised shopping journey. Trained to listen, to address customers’ needs, and create relaxed experiences, they effectively navigate customers from browsing to final transaction. Heck, they’ll even involve shopping companions in the decision making process! Identifiable by their passion, their ability to select relevant product and demonstrating a hunger for sales and repeat custom, retailers quite rightly recognise the value they add.

To integrate such customer focus and business goal oriented approach into the myriad of technical tools available empowers mobile retail partners to deliver commercially successful, personalised shopping experiences. Integrating mobile technology tools - timed push notifications, social media, filters to ensure relevance of product and maintained communication through apps on customers’ personal devices - results in extremely powerful retail apps that increase customer acquisition, maintain active users, boost sales and increase engagement with the retailer, being presented to the market.

Mystery Shoppers - committed by financial contract at least - are similarly significant. Mystery Shoppers ensure that standards of customer service are upheld. Objective and ruthless when it comes to in store systems and processes, using Mystery Shoppers is an effective tactic in any retailer’s strategy. In the same way that store performance depends upon each process and customer service functioning, mobile applications require all processes to work seamlessly, for every user. Style over substance simply won’t do, and this applies to all retail.

Gathering insight - as Mystery shoppers do - and feeding it into the management of customer experiences, mobile retail partners are able to measure apps in terms of the process effectiveness and user activity. Armed with intelligent technologies and data capture software that maps the customer journey, retailers can then operate dynamic mobile strategies based on shared learnings between partners, interpreted for retail. There is no excuse for leaving performance to chance.

Any developer worth their salt is capable of building a creative mobile application, but only when technical is teamed with retail expertise - customer focused strategy and business goal approach - will mobile deliver the desired long term benefits.

We may all shuffle our skills and experience to satisfy the customer, but really, we know that it’s that special blend - that magic formula - that produces an application that delivers in terms of boosting sales, customer retention, loyalty and advocacy.