Retail Analytics and WhatsApp Marketing Webinar​

Full transcript:

[00:00:01.190] – Host

Hey guys, how are you doing? I hope you’re all doing very
well. Firstly, I would like to make sure can you hear my voice? Yes? No? Okay,
perfect. Yeah guys, it’s really honor to finally meet you online and I hope the
weather is calm and nice and Malaysia and Indonesia. So welcome all our
friends. We’re all very happy to have you here. I see there are some people
still not coming in, but I don’t think we have the time to wait for them. So we
will start straight away. So I hope you guys all have make yourself some nice
good coffee and tea, find yourself a comfortable corner and really enjoy our
webinar. We’re here to assist you and to help your business. We really hope
that we can provide you with some valuable insight to let you know how to
conquer some difficulties you might experience in your retail business. Or
perhaps you might find some very insightful strategies that would help you to
bring your business to the right next level. So I would like to introduce our
honorable speaker, which is Barry from Comeby.io. He will be the founder and
CEO and also our partner from Ominichat, which is Nixon.

He’s our senior business representative. So I’m sure that
you will have a great time and we will have a QAS section in the very end of
our webinar and we also prepare you a pretty surprise, a small surprise. So
make sure that you stay with us, bear with us till the very last minute. Okay,
so now I’m going to pass my screen to Barry. Barry, are you ready? Yep. Okay.

[00:01:49.810] – Barry Ooi (Comeby.io)

All right, I’m going to share my screen in a okay, here we
go.

Cool.

Thanks, Ellen. Very good afternoon to everyone who took
precious time out of your Thursday to join us today. My name is Barry. I’m the
co founder and CEO of Comeby. We are a retail analytics platform. We’re based
in Malaysia, but we operate globally. For those of you who are from Malaysia,
it’s worth noting also that we are a Mexico subsidiary, which is Malaysia’s
largest telecommunications company. So data is core to our being. What I’m
going to be covering on today’s topic is essentially it’s going to be retail
analytics 101. And this is going to be focused very much on goods and products
kind of retail. So for my friends from the FNB industry may not be super
relevant, but I’m sure there are some things that you can take away from my
talk today. So I’ll be covering, I guess, the background of where we are today
in the retail industry. And then I’ll share more about what actually is retail
analytics. And then number three, why it’s important and how to gather more
data inside.

Your offline retail stores.Okay, so I’m going to start
first. With let me see. There we go. So the retail landscape has shifted quite
a bit.

Yeah. Especially since post COVID. What we’re seeing is that
increasingly tougher challenges, sure, people are coming back to your shopping
malls, coming back to your retail stores, and so on, but what. We’re seeing is
still that they’re coming back, but they’re not necessarily buying. There’s a
lot of window shopping activity nowadays, and a lot of this is driven by the
search in e commerce activity that we saw during COVID People got very
comfortable and used to shopping on shopee, lazada and so on. So they’re coming
back to the stores for the experiential touch. And, you know, maybe they take
some time, they go home, they search online on shopee, and then they buy
elsewhere instead. So they’re coming back to the stores, but not necessarily
buying.

The second challenge is this increased competition with
ecommerce.As I mentioned during COVID shoppers became.More savvy with shopping
online. They’re smarter now, so even when they come to your offline stores,
they know how to look for more information. They know how to search, pick up
the phone to look for reviews, maybe snap a picture and send it to their
friends and ask them, hey, what do you think about this? They know how to
Google online for better deals as well.

And another challenge also with your stores opening back up
again, you’re spending thousands of dollars to drive your marketing campaigns,
to drive people back into the stores. But without any actual data on the
traffic and footfall that’s coming into your offline stores, your promotions
are kind of like blind shots in the dark, right? You’re not really sure if what
you’re doing is working or not. And this leads me to essentially the key to
this whole problem here, the digital shopper.

The post COVID shopper is post omnichannel. I think we’re
all familiar with the term omnichannel. Omnichannel means that you’re present
on all channels. You’re present on shopee. You’re present on, let’s say,
Zalora. You’ve got your own e commerce website, you’ve got your physical
stores, and then maybe you’ve got your live streaming stores as well. But
shoppers are not just omnichannel, they are digital, meaning that they’re
coming back to your stores now, but they’re also online at the same time that
they are offline inside your stores quite often. I’m sure many of you have
noticed your customers in your stores pulling out their phones to look for more
information or maybe perhaps taking pictures and so on. So this is what we call
the digital shopper. So for this new kind of shopper, how can we actually sell
better to them.

Now, taking you guys back to school for a bit. So recall
that shopper funnel, right? Many of you have e commerce websites, right? So I’m
sure you know that through Google analytics, through your own e commerce
analytics solutions and so on, you know that you’re able to measure everything
that happens on your website.

You know how many people come into your website. You know
whether they stay or whether they bounce? How long are they spending on your
website? Are they really exploring through different pages? What products are
they looking at? Do they put products into their shopping cart and then leave
the website? And do they eventually convert them out at the end? So the point
of this funnel here, and this is essentially the key to my whole webinar today,
is this shopper funnel, right? So the key to this funnel for an ecommerce store
is to trying to understand, to a microscopic detail what people are actually
interested in and doing on. Your website with the sole purpose of at the bottom
of the funnel to remarket back to them regardless of whether they make a
purchase or whether they came to your website. And then they bounced out. You
want to remarket to them and you want to make it very, very personalized. And
according to research, 80%, four in five shoppers are more likely to make a
purchase if they had experienced a personalized, customized retail experience.

Essentially, people want to feel special, right?

And that’s why it’s super important to understand and
capture as much information as you can about every single shopper that comes
into your stores.

Now let’s switch a little bit and think about the offline
retail store. What do you think are the stages inside an offline retail store? What
kind of data points would you be able to capture? What kind of questions would
you ask? I’m going to see whether anyone can chime in in the chat. Anyone has
any thoughts?

Aditi.

Omar, Fiona, I’m just calling out names from the attendees
list here.

[00:08:15.380] – Host

I would say browsing as well.

[00:08:17.780] – Barry Ooi (Comeby.io)

Browsing.

Browsing behavior? Yep. Okay, so are people actually
browsing in your store? Customer experience. Okay, Indira, how would you
actually measure and quantify this customer experience? Anyone else got
thoughts? Let’s try to get to some measurable detail traffic to store.

Great. That’s a good one.

So, let’s see. So, yeah, let’s let’s start with traffic to
store.

So, as an offline retail store, you want to know? Okay, I’ve
spent like hundreds of thousands of dollars to open up a store inside, let’s
say, Pavilion KL, right? I’ve spent so much on renovations. It looks so
beautiful. How do I know whether my placement in this shopping mall is good or
not? How do I know whether I’m actually getting value from the shopping mall?
How many people are walking past my store?

How many people actually came in? And then once they
actually come inside the store, where do they go inside the store? How are they
engaging with my store? How long do they stay? Someone mentioned, I think it
was Indira who mentioned that customer experience. And Omar also mentioned
browsing. Right?

So what products are they actually browsing? What kind of
variance are people more interested in? Let’s say size nine versus size five.
What kind of questions are they asking about your stuff? Are they more
interested to know about deals? Are they more interested to know about
recommendations? And finally, what is the actual conversion rate of the store?

I’m driving 1000 people into my store today.How many percent
of them actually make a purchase? That’s quite important to know, especially if
you’re investing so much into your offline store. Right. And the goal, of
course, at the end of the day, it still comes back to that remarketing aspect.
You tie it all back inside your loyalty, inside your CRM platform.

So those of you with retail stores, how are you currently
collecting these data points? I’d like you to think a little bit about this.
I’ll come back to this question later on. So now we’ve identified that actually
it’s not that there’s no data inside your store. Customers are actually coming
in and they’re generating heaps of data points inside.But the problem is that
most retailers are not capturing much of this information.

Much of these data points, we call these offline cookies,
offline cookie data points. Most retailers on average are only capturing up to
10% of the data points that are being generated inside your ecommerce

Inside your retail store, compared to an ecommerce store
that captures a 100% of all the data points that’s being generated. So this is a
huge hole that you have.

You’re essentially sitting on a data gold mine, but you’re
capturing very little of it. So let’s jump a little bit and think about like,
okay, data is great and all, but what can I actually do with that data? Data is
only as useful as the insights that come out of it.

Right.

So data helps us to prevent shooting in the dark. I’m sure
there are some marketers on today’s call, right?

Any marketers in the room, any hands up?

I saw in the sign ups, there were a few.

I’m going to see whether anyone’s here or not.

I see that there’s an Abigail Lorencia who signed up as a
marketer. There’s a jamie.

Oh, hey. Jamie from Poplook.

Annabeth from dressing Paula.

So we’ve got a few marketers who signed up. So as a marketer,
you probably want to know, okay, what is the actual. ROI of my online to
offline campaigns and spending maybe like 10,000 ringgit to.Drive people to
come into my store? The only way I may actually able to measure whether my
campaign is effective or not is by looking at whether there’s actually a sale
conversion. But it’s still I mean, the ROI of your marketing campaign is more
than just a transaction. People don’t necessarily buy straight away the first
time that they come to your store.

Right.

So you want to measure whether there’s.

Actually an increase in footfall for any.

Visual merchandisers in the room. These are the people who
arrange how the store actually looks like. There’s also a lot of especially
during Chinese New Year Christmas. Raya, you spend a lot on the ROI of your
window displays of your key visuals and so on. So are people actually checking
out your new display shelf or not? What’s the ROI, also, of your window
displays? For store planners, people who plan what.

The store looks, the layout is like, how do I actually
arrange the layout? How do I actually get people to spend more time in areas
where there seems to be not a lot of people tend to go to that section of the
store. How can I actually make sure that people are being driven to that area?
How do I identify where people walk inside my store? Bars, merchandisers? Oh,
if you’re one of these roles, you have my sympathy. It’s a very tough job to
do. Demand forecasting. And a lot of your demand forecasting is probably based
just on what’s being sold today, and you’re trying to forecast, like, six
months down the line into the future. So how can I improve stock forecasting?
If I could give you data points about what people are trying on inside the
fitting rooms, for example, or what people are picking up, even though they don’t
necessarily make that purchase, that’s an additional data point that would be
really useful for your forecasting models. And of course, as a store manager store
manager, it’s very important for them to know that their stores are working
well, are very effective. They want to know how many shoppers came in today,
how effective are my staff in actually speaking and serving customers and store
owner? Storm if you’re a store owner or like, in management, you want to know,
what’s the conversion rate of each store? Why are sales low today? Is it
because not enough people are coming in? Is it because it was a rainy day and
there’s not a lot of people inside the shopping mall, period? You want to know
also, why exactly are people leaving? Is it because of a price? Is it because there’s
not enough stock in your store?

So these are all the kinds of questions that you can solve
if you had that kind of data, if you’re collecting the kind of data that I was
talking about in the previous slide. And the thing is that there are various
tools and systems already exist, and I’m sure some of you are already using
some of these tools, right? So at the top of the funnel.

We’re talking about footfall and traffic. You’ve got the
basic footfall cameras that you set up at the entrance. That counts in the
number of people who walk in and out, right?

So even if the one delivery guy comes in, he also gets
counted if your staff goes in and out five times, he also gets counted
sometimes. You’ve got staff who I know for some of the smaller boutiques,
you’ve got your staff who have, like, a people counter just clicking, clicking,
clicking, or recording down on your pen and paper, taking note of the number of
people that came in today. And the second layer, you want to know where people
are moving throughout your store. There are solutions like Tapway, for
instance, founded by a friend of mine that works on CCTV cameras, that tracks
using cameras. It detects where people are going throughout the store in the
middle of the funnel, talking about browsing activity. You’ve got apps as well.
So you’ve got like Nike apps where inside a Nike store you can use the app to
discover more Nike products. You’ve got Decathlon with their RFID technology as
well. Decathlon is essentially like the industry leader in terms of retail
technology. They’ve got so much incredible technology in terms of hardware and
software. So 100% of all their products attacked with RFID as well. And this is
actually something that you guys can also start to implement to keep track of
all the goods on your shelves and whether things are moving in and out of
storerooms, in and out of fitting rooms and so on. It’s quite an exciting
technology I’m quite excited about. And at the bottom of the funnel, you’ve got
your POS analytics. Stuff like Zillex and Shopify have built in analytics into
their POS platforms. You’ve got Sicarda as well, a local Malaysian company that
provides POS analytics.

So all of these things tend to play in they tend to sort of
play in one layer of that funnel. There are different tools that fulfill each
station funnel.

But even a company like Decathlon, I was talking to them
just a couple of days ago, and they were saying that they don’t actually have
anything above this RFID part. Even though they were so tech forward, they had
nothing that really stitched together. The whole story of the entire shopping
journey. So the challenge here, and this is the key thing that I like you to
take home and think about the challenge here, is that you’re probably
collecting bits and pieces of this funnel throughout your store already. The
challenge is in really piecing them together so that you can get insights and
such that you can actually create that fully personalized retail experience.
Remember, I said earlier, four in five shoppers are more likely to make a
purchase if they received a personalized retail experience. And that’s where
our friends like Omnichat can come in to help you to piece together that story
and remarket to them on a one on one basis through things like WhatsApp
marketing?

So how does Comeby actually do it? And of course, this is
going to be a little bit of a pitch. Comeby is essentially a pocket assistant
for offline shoppers and Google Analytics for retailers. What we do is we
capture offline. Cookies left by shoppers to create these. Full funnel insights
into the shopper experience and shopper behavior so that we can deliver a more
customized personalized digital shopping experience. So what Comeby does is
that we layer these three levels of insights. We’ve got Zonal Insights, which
tracks what happens at the top of the funnel, how many people come in, where
they go throughout the store, how many people walk past, and so on. We link
that together with the product Insights, which is the middle of the funnel.
What are people actually looking at together.

With that bottom of the funnel, which is your POS insights.
So whatever system platform that you guys are running on, we integrate with all
of it together to stitch that full story that I was talking about, that full
funnel Insights, that’s how you actually start to generate value from the data
points that are being created in your store. How it works is that, well, we’ve
got hardware devices set up inside the store. Our devices will pick up shoppers
unique phone signals, so we know how many people walk past, how many people
come in. We can track traffic, footfall heat, maps, pathways. And as they
engage inside the store, they can scan these QR codes to trigger digital
shopping assistance. So they can essentially self serve. If they want more
information about this pair of Nike shoes on the shelf, they want to know, do
you have it in my size nine or not?

Without having to refer to a staff or call for assistance,
they can just scan it and see, okay, do you have this in my size available or not
in this outlet? So we give them information on sizes, availability, further
product information.But if they actually want to speak to someone inside the
store, not everyone is keen to just complete a full journey online on their
own. They can also engage with staff.

So they tap a button.

A staff is alerted with that full.

Context about which shopper, in which section of your store
needs help, for which product. And we also give insights and data about their
browsing behavior on previous visits. So, for example, if Nixon comes and
requests for help, i, as a sales assistant, I’ll be able to see that, oh,
actually, Nixon is a loyal customer. He’s visited four times in the past month,
and he’s been browsing ten different products. But for some reason, this guy
hasn’t made a purchase yet. I’m going to go and close him because now I know
that he’s a loyal customer and he’s interested in these ten different products.
My recommendations become much more personalized.

And we stitch that all together for Insights. So store
manager gets a real time view of the floor activity, what’s happening in their
store, and also staff performance and the management, of course, they get a
full view on the store funnel insights and conversion behavior. I’ll end with a
couple of examples with our clients. So one is with Alexand Sports. Alexander
is Malaysia’s biggest sports retailer with them. So what they were looking for
is one of the use cases was that they wanted to know, my lease is coming up
inside this shopping mall. I want to negotiate a better deal or a better
location with the shopping mall.

That’s the first thing that they wanted to know. And the
second thing is, like, I know I’m not getting enough people into my store. I
want to make sure that they actually stay longer in my store. So by giving them
data and insights about the heat map in the store, the dwell time in the store
and the convertibility of each zone inside the store, they were able to
rearrange their VM and rearrange their staff. Positioning to make sure that
zone two, which was the hottest zone, had more attention from the staff,
resulting in about 7% increase in shopper time spent inside the store. And of
course, Retail 101. The longer that people spend inside your store, the more
likely they are to make a purchase.

Right.

Continuing with that Alexan example as well.

So, because we had these self-serve Digital shopping assistants,
we saw that staff efficiency per shopper actually rose 20% as shoppers were self-serving
and scanning products on their own. What this does is that it basically reduces
the need for the staff to be stalking customers and following them throughout
the store. It helps the staff to deal with customers who are maybe not ready to
speak to the staff yet, but who want more information, so that frees up the
staff to be doing more effective things with the time. Also, if the shopper
encounters something that’s out of stock, when you prompt them with this
message and say, sorry, this product is out of stock, if you leave your contact
information, RHQ will get back to you with the availability of this product and
you can take a 10% discount off of the purchase.

And this was a successful campaign for them. Clients
reconverted at a rate of about 50% based on just this prompt. There’s a bit
more that I like to talk about, but I think Adelaide is probably going to kick
me off this call soon. So, yeah, my key takeaway for you, for you guys from
this webinar is that, number one, try and understand what kinds of data points
are being generated by the shoppers inside the store. Break it down into number
two. Break it down into that funnel and.

Try and figure out what are simple ways for you to start
tracking layers of this funnel, either by recording by paper and pen and paper
about the number of people that come in or even just tagging on RFIDs to all
your products to ensure trackability of each SKU.

And thirdly, to learn how to stitch together all those
layers of that funnel to create insights that you can actually act upon and
increase sales for your retail stores.

Okay, that’s it.

Thank you. I’ll pass it over to my buddy Nixon, who will
talk about what can you do next? After you’ve got all these great insights, how
can you actually reach out to and create these personalized conversations on a
one on one basis with your customers.

Over to you, Nixon.