Noel Goggin, CEO No two shoppers are alike. Each shopper has their own distinctive characteristics, preferences, and behaviors. This makes it extremely necessary for retailers to thoroughly understand their customers to profitably align their offerings with customer preferences in every channel and touchpoint.
Gone are the days when a shopper’s “path to purchase” was controlled by the brands and in-store shopping environment. With digitization, retailers can now create a rich, effortless, and customer-centric shopping journey, putting the shopper in control. However, understanding customer preference and behavior is not an easy task, when every retailer wants to lure customers away and at the same time, retain them. This is where a Customer Relationship Management or CRM partner comes in. Focusing on one-to-one customer engagement and customer loyalty, a CRM partner is completely dedicated to help retailers understand their customers. With a long history in retail CRM that spans 22 years, Aptos is a core believer in the “power of each customer”. The company’s solutions, Aptos CRM provides a 360-degree view of each customer using their powerful segmentation, loyalty, and campaign management tools to engage customers in all channels. “To drive customer loyalty, it is imperative to know each customer and understand what they buy, what they want, and how they engage across all channels and touchpoints,” explains Noel Goggin, CEO, Aptos. Their CRM solutions help brands identify, profile, segment, engage, motivate, and reward each customer by creating personalized, consistent customer experiences across channels that drive visits, sales, enhance loyalty, and nurture campaign effectiveness.
“Aptos was developed with a few core words in mind: aptitude, skill, expertise, cloud, aspiration, and upward momentum,” notes Goggin.” “Engaging customers differently,” Aptos’ singular commerce platform and innovative cloud solutions unify complex omni-channel environments with the power of one customer, one brand, one inventory, one order, and one plan, to enable seamless customer experiences and optimized management of a brand’s entire enterprise.
The Power of One
Aptos CRM delivers an integrated suite of advanced tools that create and maintain mutually beneficial, personalized relationships between brands and their customers. On one hand, it gives brands a comprehensive view of each customer, combining all of their channels into a single, cloud-based database to better understand, engage, and reward shoppers with deeply personalized interactions at every phase of the customer lifecycle.
My core belief is if we make our customers successful, then we will be successful
While on the other hand, it empowers marketers with the tools to develop relevant offers and contents that are uniquely personal to each shopper—from marketing, digital channels to physical channels and fulfillment. The company does this by enabling a structured process for acquiring and applying customer knowledge to improve retention and sales.
Everything a brand desires to accomplish with CRM begins with developing and maintaining an accurate record of customers. If the customer database is of limited capacity or difficult to use or not structured for a brand’s business needs, even the most sophisticated marketing tools will fail to be effective. Aptos CRM provides integrated capabilities for customer analysis, customer segmentation, campaign management, clienteling, and loyalty points program management. Their CRM database is designed to support the broadest possible range of users, retail structures, functions, channels, and brands. Brands get to leverage a flexible retail data model based on a centralized database to empower authorized corporate employees or associates positioned in any store to identify customers and view their contact information, demographic profile, attributes, and purchase history, according to their rules. This complete view of the customer can be used for store-level clienteling to bring in traffic or for in-store suggestive selling. At the corporate level, the information can be used for detailed customer analyses as well as for offering excellent customer service in a contact center environment. Staff can access information easily with an intuitive user interface, which encourages associates to use it consistently and reduces training requirements across the board.
Intuitive Programs
Incidentally, Aptos’ intuitive Campaign and Promotion Manager empowers brands to set up campaigns and promotions, manage their execution, and track results. To support these functions in all channels, CRM can be interfaced with brands’ POS, call center, kiosk, smartphone, tablet, or e-commerce site to deliver real-time targeted communications to customers. With Aptos Loyalty and Reward Manager, brands can design and run multiple loyalty programs with the flexibility and security of a retail-proven, transaction tracking and redemption toolset. The company’s clients can communicate program benefits and news individually using one-to-one triggered messaging, or reach out to a group of program members with statement and program information across multiple channels.
As a powerful complement to Aptos CRM, the Aptos Gift and Bridal Registry solution is designed to give retail business a complete gift registry offering across channels to help brands engage with more customers, frequently, while driving revenue.
Leveraging Aptos CRM, businesses can uncover rich analytics in purchase frequency, customer segments and customer retention to grab a maximum share of customers’ wallet.
According to Goggins, the retail industry needs to “do better” to create more seamless, personalized and memorable customer experiences. By looking through the lens of its customers, and their individual goals and struggles, “that will inform how we do product development, service delivery, support and even how we compensate people. My core belief is if we make our customers successful, then we will be successful.”
"Aptos was developed with a few core words in mind: Aptitude, skill, expertise, cloud, aspiration, and upward momentum"
Triumphing Success
Aptos customer engagement solutions power more than 175 retail brands that engage over 245 million shoppers every day. One the company’s clients, a large fast-fashion growth retailer—Rue21 recently won the loyalty of its teenage customers, as well as a masterstroke of Gold Award for Customer Engagement using the Aptos retail technology platform. Rue21 was recognized by Retail TouchPoints for showcasing the most creative and successful store operations strategies. Because teen fashion trends can change quickly, rue21 used Aptos Analytics at the store and district levels to see the latest sales trends and bestsellers, alongside last year’s sales history. The client also leveraged Aptos’ CRM to identify, profile, segment, engage, motivate, and reward customers by creating personalized, consistent customer experiences across channels. This drove up their visits, sales, and customer loyalty for an age group that is famous for being unpredictable. Today, Rue21 is a $1 billion retailer that caters to the teen market with the latest fashion trends at affordable prices, operating in more than 1,200 stores in 48 states with the power of Aptos CRM.
In Momentum with Possibilities
With the explosive popularity of social media platforms, Aptos CRM provides the powerful ability to automatically identify the hidden relationships between customer, product, store, web and social interactions—ultimately orchestrating more effective marketing and merchandising decisions. Now with Aptos CRM that integrates social media, promotions managers, loyalty program managers, campaign and store managers, and assortment planners have access to all shopper interactions—created via e-commerce, email campaigns, social networks, and customer service to help them segment customers in ways that highlight product affinity, customer loyalty and response to promotions. Aptos is committed to continually improve brands’ capabilities and ensure they remain informed and up to date with its solutions and services.
According to Goggin, the step to future is all about exploring the art of the possible. “We might not always have the right answers but if we can engage customers and the broader industry, we will arrive at topics that stimulate their minds and encourage them to raise their heads and see what is next.” “If you have a mind’s eye to the future, it can inform how you execute short-term and tactical steps.”
