Get agile or pay the price, Amido
Retailers who fail to create identity-driven, agile e-commerce platforms will lose customer loyalty beyond peak online shopping seasons, Amido has warned.
It adds that customers are loyal to brands that enable a frictionless digital experience across multiple channels. With the arrival of some of the busiest shopping periods of the year and, on average, many retailers taking in 10% of all shopping trade on Black Friday alone, Amido is urging retailers to review all digital interfaces, applications and platforms if it is to generate long-term loyalty that is underpinned by identity.
“The digital native is no longer just GenXers or Millennials. Older people are increasingly shopping online with ONS stating that 75% of adults aged between 55 and 64 do – a rise of 30% since 2008. Those aged between 25 and 34 showed marginal increases with 89% - a 17% rise since 2008,” says CEO, Alan Walsh. “It is simply not enough to scale up a monolithic IT platform to cope with peaks as some services – like sign-in - need more scaling up than others. Typically, when one thing fails on this platform, everything does. Retailers must quickly adopt a platform that is agile and utilises a microservices architecture to scale up each service independently. We are seeing retailers failing with the strategy to manage these spikes in, for instance, sign-in or new customer registration, basket abandonment and online customer services because of outdated technology infrastructure."
He adds: “If the retailer wants to maintain loyalty, increase sales and build customer identities, just like we did with ASOS, then it needs to review its technology immediately and stop creating data silos. It is also not enough to simply send generic marketing or ads to customers offering similar products based on individual data sets, such as previous purchase history. In fact, it is detrimental if you get repeated emails from a one-off purchase from a generic ad you once saw.”
Amido enabled ASOS to leverage its existing technology and added a cloud solution that removed the friction associated with checkout by introducing social login across all channels, including mobile and app, stopping basket abandonment and increasing sales. The inclusion of social sign on delivered instant insight into newly acquired customers, richer information around customer registration, an up-to-date view of each returning customer and a single representation of any customer – no matter how they sign in to ASOS.
Walsh says: “A joined up identity strategy improves customer experience by reducing spam. Personalisation excellence comes when you combine your CRM system with insight gained from multiple data sources (social profiles, email marketing, order or browsing history, customer services, transactional history, cookies, online journey etc.) to offer up products and services that customers want, when they want them and in the right channel. You can then apply machine learning to predict future behaviour and pre-empt what customers want before they know they want it. One technology product cannot do all this – it needs a combination to build the identity that will underpin personalisation, customer retention and loyalty.”
