Hyper-Personalization and the
Connected Customer Experience
Unimpeded green health codes across the country, non-contact online orders in restaurants, and 24-hour fast delivery from e-commerce are just three examples of how technology has powered innovation in services and experience. In a world where digital tools are the primary link between brands and consumers, it is first and foremost customer experience as the criterion guiding consumers spend.
Today, we are living in a choice-rich fragmented world. Consumers have many choices defining how they interact with brands, products and services. And with the help of digital technologies, they can easily tell the brand who they are, what they want, and even how they feel. However, most of the brands are still not truly listening, responding, or proactively engaging consumers in a consistent, connected and personally relevant way. At the same time, we see some brands are rapidly gaining consumers' interest and attention, fostering strong loyalty and growing their revenue and margin faster than their competitors. We believe the secret is these successful brands have learned how to harness the power of data and to leverage technology to provide better-connected consumer experiences.
In this month's "ThePulse" you will obtain the latest insights and case studies in data-driven, technology embedded customer experience management.
CEO of dentsu China Customer Experience Management (CXM) Business
Managing Director of Merkle China
Ken Hong
// The pace of the game has changed.
This year Tmall Double Eleven has transformed from the one mega sales day to an extended stretch from November 1st – 11th encompassing two buying waves.
Shoppers may complete a purchase with the Double Eleven special deals as early as 1st November with presale began on 21st October.
The new pace has relieved the logistical stress for goods delivery experienced by merchants in previous years.
// What does it mean to brands?
The two-wave sales rhythm presents opportunity and challenges for brands. A longer Double Eleven sales cycle implies brands shall start their pre-buzz campaigns early. Brands are also required to plan very carefully about the special deals and highlighted products correspondingly in each wave. The overall plan has to be flexible and available for real-time optimisation, based on the first wave’s sales performance.
Customer Loyalty
Management Insights - B2B
Many B2B companies that target business services have achieved robust growth this year through the upsurge of online digital transformation after impacted by COVID-19. For the managers of these B2B companies, they are facing the challenges of how to manage and maintain the relationship with enterprise-level customers. Merkle classified the customer loyalty management types into three categories based on the experience that we served for these leading B2B companies, and provides the following insights accordingly:
Consumer – style Customers’ Loyalty
This strategy is suitable for B2B companies whose customers are both purchasing decision makers and product users, such as office supplies, electronic components, SaaS software services for SMEs. Similar as consumer business, the final decision makers of corporate purchases will be individual. To maintain and manage these individual users, Merkle suggests that companies can learn from the loyalty strategies and engagement methods of B2C companies, such as seasonal promotions, repurchase discounts, recommended discounts, and other high-frequency, membership activities etc.
Expert – style Customers’ Loyalty
Most B2B companies’ target audience are professionals or experts in the industry, for instance, the engineers are the target audience of electronic component companies, the professional doctor groups are target audience of medical equipment companies. For these enterprises, the core driver of loyalty management is to meet the expectations and win trust from the experts by continuously outputting in high-quality contents and activities. As for the technologies that enabled, Merkle recommends that companies need to establish CMS system to manage and optimize all marketing materials, also need to build SCRM system and maintain the community of experts.
Store – type Customers’ Loyalty
For those enterprises who have store-based (distributors and retail stores) customers, loyalty management is still an important strategy for maintaining corporate growth. Merkle Loyalty Solutions identified an opportunity to consolidate individual brand programs into a single unified program. This approach was connected to core business objectives to increase cross-brand spend and market share, while directly unlocking opportunity for broader participation across customer segments. Additionally, Financial modeling included projections of enrollment, revenue and costs along with scenario and net benefit analyses that validated and informed program design.
Merkle Customer
Data Platform（CDP）
Consumers want a seamless and connected experience wherever and whenever they interact with our businesses. Yet too many brands still deliver disconnected experiences in the context of siloed channels and technology. Part of the solution to close the experience gap lies in how we leverage customer data effectively, and that’s why really putting emphasis on the importance of data management for your business is crucial. A CDP is a piece of technology that’s created specifically for marketing purposes. It provides a central storage facility for all customer data, disparate pieces of which may historically have been stored in siloed locations, making them hard to access and aggregate. It’s also a platform that spans all channels – contrary to traditional data-focused tech that was restricted to single channels. Merkle CDP unites the total history of behaviours and interactions across all methods of communication to deliver a highly robust and detailed understanding of each unique customer and prospect during the whole process of customer experience transformation.
Introducing iStore - a fully equipped self-service vending machine that we built from scratch in our Isobar lab.
It has vision, voice and gesture recognition, WeChat integration and a huge touch screen for any kind of retail interactions that keep our customers excited. The prototype is ready for demoing and we’re building more test apps for different use cases.
Passing on love and smiles
to schools in Yunnan
The situation with the epidemic in China is gradually becoming under control. In Yunnan province, deep in southwest China, children from Isobar Cedar Class have started their new school journey.
At the beginning of the first week after National Day holiday in October, we launched the "School Year Gift Pledge Program" to employees of Isobar China Group. So far, we have received 90 gift packs of school supplies, each of which is attached with a handwritten message by our employees to send goodwill messages to the children from Isobar Cedar Class.
// Together with children
Meanwhile, Chief Growth Officer Britney Pai and Chief Creative Officer Chris Chen of Isobar China Group visited two middle schools in Lincang Yunnan last week to see the children from Isobar Cedar Class in grades 1 & 3. Britney and Chris also visited the children’s home to become more familiar with their school studies as well as their living conditions.
The optimism of teachers and children there deeply touched our visiting members. Britney said that "I sincerely admire all the teachers there, who work from early morning to late evening every day, keeping the students’ company. We strongly feel the enthusiasm and love from the teachers there." "These hard-working, optimistic and lovely children who are strong in the face of hardships are so encouraging. If you treat this world with kindness, it will treat you kindly in return," Chris said.
"Isobar Cedar Class" commonweal project started in 2016. Global CEO of Dentsu Creative & Global Executive Chairman of Isobar Jean Lin called several senior team members of the group together, to participate in the high school aid project initiated by Shanghai Cedar Charity Foundation. They provided private funding to 50 students from No.1 Middle School of Lincang, Yunnan, and specially named the class of these 50 students "Isobar Cedar Class".
Jean Lin said that "I have read many reports about poor families before, but it was not until I participated in the commonweal activities of Cedar Charity a few years ago that I truly felt that there are still so many poor families in the world. I once saw a child who used a pencil that was shorter than her fingertip, but she still used that pencil to write, sitting in a classroom without lights. They still studied so hard in such a tough environment, with hope of ridding themselves of poverty to change the destiny of their families through the acquisition of knowledge. The idea behind Isobar Cedar Class is to allow more children to have opportunities for a brighter future."
Since then, we donate school supplies to students from Cedar Class every year to encourage and support these children. Over the past few years, we have regularly received warm greetings and gratitude from students in Cedar Class. Today, the 50 students of the first Isobar Cedar Class have become sophomores at universities, starting a new journey in life, while the second Isobar Cedar Class has already entered the final year of high school and has begun to prepare for the college entrance examination.
We would like to express gratitude to all colleagues who have provided care and support to Isobar Class. Students from Isobar Class will go on studying and growing with our care and support. In the future, they will also treat the world with love and kindness.
Cedar Commonweal High School Aid Project is affiliated with Shanghai Cedar Charity Foundation, which has always been our close commonweal partner. "Isobar Cedar Class" commonweal project is one of our cooperative projects.
Shanghai Cedar Charity Foundation was formally registered and established in 2015 as a non-public fundraising educational commonweal organization whose purpose is to help children in poverty-stricken areas as well as to help young people to enhance self-reliance and self-confidence. Shanghai Cedar Charity Foundation hopes that elites from all walks of life can work together to build a platform that gathers love and positive energy, with a focus on study and life assistance through education, to help ambitious young people through continuous support, and to help transform them from being the recipient to the helper. In this way, love reaches out, the cycle of goodwill is renewed.
If you would like to join us in this educational commonweal through Cedar Charity, please visit the official website of Cedar (www.cedarcharity.org), or scan the QR code to follow Cedar for more details.
MetLife Customer Experience Plan
Challenge
MetLife is one of the world’s leading financial services companies, providing advanced life insurance products and services in China. MetLife expects to transform the traditional interaction model which is insurance policy transaction-oriented, passive response, and temporary random into continuously improved customer experience program with an emotional, personalized, systematic and continuous active engagements.
Solution
1. Merkle created a completed connected engagement circle to link the brand, existing customers, and agencies in single platform, to realize the initiative care for customers, and empower the agencies to communicate with customers in an efficiency way.
2. To provide one-stop integrated marketing automation solution and services.
3. To personalize the campaigns and use experience by leveraging data analysis and optimization.
4. Highly customized WeChat, SMS and other multi-channel automation services to adapt to specific business scenarios and internal IT requirements.
Digi-Key Electric Customer
Loyalty Program
Challenge
Digi-Key Electric is one of the fastest growing distributor of electronic components in the world. With the gradual increase in the number of individual consumers on the platform, Digi-Key is facing challenges to insight into the consumer-type consumers. On the other hand, due to the lower interaction between the brand and individual consumers, it lacks corresponding marketing and social strategies. Therefore, it is impossible for individual consumers to be loyalty with the brand.
Solution
1. Merkle helps Digi-Key create content tags and develop targeted customer communication strategies, built a large-scale engineer community.
2. Design the customer loyalty programs to increase the number of WeChat registrations and sustainable customer interactions.
3. Using WeChat as a platform to manage contents and target audiences, combined the membership loyalty system and the company's own third-party channels to provide members with various promotions and activities.
4. After the project was online, WeChat followers increased by 40%, WeChat active users exceeded 30%, the number of members increased by 350%.
KFC Rainy Day
Pop-up Menu
Available in the KFC app, only when it rains. Marketing technology that reacts to real-time weather and location data. Transforming how restaurants operate for maximum eCommerce transactions.
Challenge
The Chinese food delivery business is worth 85.7 billion dollars a year. And when it rains, sales can surge 10%. However, many restaurant brands struggle to fulfil these unpredictable order spikes during rainy days. So how did KFC transform its business operations and ecommerce engine to be ready for an additional 60,000 delivery orders per hour on rainy days?
Solution
Introducing KFC’s pop-up Rainy Day delivery menu. Without any process change or hiring extra labor, KFC streamlined kitchen operations at scale. When it rained, real-time weather and location data instantly triggered the KFC app to unlock pop-up Rainy Day limited time combo-meals as KFC kitchen employees in that locality stood by to pack and deliver thousands of meals. Because we bundled KFC favorites, customers could choose quickly and check out in under 5 seconds! The ability to breakthrough to the hardest to reach audience makes this a Grand Prix winner at ROI Awards and MMA SMARTIES Awards.
Challenge
In China, the eSports population has reached over 440 million. However, the pain caused by long time e-gaming has become a new medical concern. As an arthritis pain relief brand, Voltaren has been deeply involved in the traditional sports scene marketing for more than ten years. How can Voltaren leverage the great opportunity to join the emerging eSports industry to raise awareness and boost sales?
Solution
Voltaren became the first OTC brand cooperated with eSports as MDL’s sponsor brand. First of all, Voltaren turned the Dota magic weapon into a pain relief magic tool “Battle Fury Pain Massager”, instantly closing the psychological distance between itself and the players. Dota’s legendary players and eSports anchors showcased the “Pain Massager” on four major live streaming platforms, which brought 4.9 billion brand impressions to Voltaren. In addition, Voltaren and JD.COM jointly created #JD eSports Day#, successfully converted traffic to actual sales performance. From traditional pharmaceutical sales to eSports arena, Voltaren together with hundreds of millions of players, fight for their love without body pain!
Shanghai office and Master Kong have launched a new annual campaign for brand activation. Activing brand communication campagin with various noodles favors, including spicy beef, hot beef, and old mature vinegar spicy beef for different national regions, and joined with Tencent top hit game PUBG and BTV cultural variety show "I'm waiting for you in the Summer Palace". Also through the national regional head TV channels and online media platform (iqiyi, Youku, Tencent, Mango TV)to spread, in the advertising film testing research, it obtained high ratings.
Via the deep communication with users by the game and social media at Master Kang hot beef noodle x PUBG, and create a series of sales and co-name activities, which unbloking closed loop marketing of online and offline, helps Master Kang get more audience interest. On the co-name between the old mature vinegar spicy beef noodles x the show "I'm waiting for you in the Summer Palace", Through the guest Wang Hedi, the edible scene was shown to encourage consumers to purchase by name, and interact with the outside by H5 game, cooperative packaging and derivative products to promote the integration of product and efficiency.
Swellfun
Brand xFestival Marketing
Shanghai office assisted Swellfun to create a gift to all cumsumors for the Mid-Autumn Festival Swellfun with a warm heart, inheriting 600 years of high-quality taste for JingLi, bringing out the beautiful meaning of lucky. Through the series of micro-movies, close to the scene, refract the reality, creating a moving moment in the Mid-Autumn Festival, causing everyone to think about what lucky koi belongs to people at the present moment, which gave consumers a profound gift during this festival time.
Unicharm moony new panty-shape diaper was lanuched on September, via the deep insight of Unicharm made a creative TVC since dentsutop is its long-term advertising partner, ally with brand ambassador of Moony, Shengyi Huang, and top KOL Yi Sun on Xiaohongshu, which all contributed to the "Golden Crown" campaign of Unicharm.
Sheng yi Huang, who is one sister in Mango TV's hot show "Sisters Who Makes Waves",was shooting the product vlog with the Weibo hit reserching .At the same time, Xiaohongshu, as the main position of this campaign, invited 25 KOLs to release product information segmentally, revailling from the teaser of product. Top-level head KOL Sun Yi reconmandation of Moony, which added luster to this campaign, with the heavy live broadcast of Xiaohongshu Super Product Day on September 13, creating a new sales record.
Thanks for reading, we look forward to checking your pulse again next month.
