Canadian Retailer - Spring 2014 - 24

ROUNDTABLE SERIES 2014

associate and making sure that the
customer knows how they can use
that to extend their shopping experience. It's all about the customer
and the way they want to shop.
Simmonds: You have to make sure
that the customer is always at the
heart of everything that you do.
When it comes down to it, we're
selling an experience. We leverage
social media to send our messages
out to our customers and then we
marry that content with product and
bring it all back to our location.
MC: How are you currently leveraging the capabilities of mobile and
how does it tie in to your offering?
Simmonds: We just did a pilot
project with a local startup called
HotSpot. Our customers sign up
with them through us, and when
they're downtown, we're alerted and
can then take it to the next level and
offer to pay for their parking. Soon
we'll also be using in-store censors
that will ping their phones and
allow us to thank them for their purchase or welcome them downtown
for a store visit anytime they're in
our geographic area.

Jordan Versluis, Boathouse.

"...the abundance of information available to retailers who
can leverage this data properly is astounding. But, you've got
to be able to separate the signal from the noise. There's a lot
of unstructured data out there that's rendered meaningless
without the proper context and insight."
- JORDAN VERSLUIS, Boathouse
on mobile devices users, should be
able to redeem immediately on their
mobile phone or present their phone
to a cashier for redemption.

Carter: There are so many interesting things going on with mobile.
But you want to think about the
whole customer experience and
how mobile's going to enhance that
experience and drive sales. You
want to make sure that you have a
store locator and rich product data.
But, most people are not going to
transact there. They're going to take
their mobile phone and go into the
store and check out the product that
you've shown them on their device.
It can be a great traffic generator.

Watanabe: From an omni perspective, mobile helps to facilitate the
transition between the online and
in-store experience. For example,
customers come to our stores looking for items they've researched and/
or present coupon offers on their
phones. We know that a growing proportion of our Web visits and email
opens are from mobile devices. With
that in mind, we are re-designing our
mobile site and introducing responsive design for our online marketing.

MC: There is so much being said
today about "Big Data". Are you
leveraging the abundance of data
out there to better engage with your
customer and to make their interaction with you easier?

Versluis: We market digitally and
through mobile. But, the challenge
is getting your store staff up to
speed with these new technologies
and the associated capabilities. If
you can adapt these technologies in

24 |

store, it will help you transact more
quickly, operating at a higher level
and create an enhanced, customized
experience for your customer.

Connell: We email our customers
coupon codes generated by our
e-commerce software which can
be redeemed in-store or online
via desktop or mobile. Since the
majority of our emails are viewed

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Carter: We're getting there. We still
have a rudimentary CRM system.
We're upgrading that and our POS
for the first time in a long time. We
have a big business intelligence team
who need the tools today, and so, to
take the right information and relate
it to our customer base, we're reverse
engineering-taking customer data
from our stores and online and using
a tool to be able to segment within
Facebook, who we're targeting with
messages on a granular level.
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Canadian Retailer - Spring 2014

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