Longchamp to boost in-store customer experience through technology
The opening of its new flagship store in London in October will coincide with Longchamp boosting the in-store experience for customers through greater use of its multi-channel CRM capabilities. By Glynn Davis in Venice
Speaking
at the Cegid Connections 2013 Conference in Venice Andre Louit, group chief
financial officer at Longchamp, said: “It’s the beginning of using CRM
[for us] with baby step after baby step. We’re using the customer database to
email customers so that when they then go to a store they’ll be recognised and
a pop-up will appear on the PoS (Point-of-Sale) to say they’ve received the
email.”
When this
is combined with the likes of customer purchase histories and the ability to
offer them tailored promotions at the till then it will be a powerful tool for
Longchamp. However, Louit recognises that such technology is only of value
in-store if the employees are fully trained.
“If
you do not train them properly, by increasing the awareness of digital and
getting them to interact with customers,
then it will be very difficult [in the future]. Customer service is going to be
more and more of a key. Otherwise, like any other business, the store is just a
showroom,” he warns.
Louit
says the company is also due to begin experimenting with new technologies in
specific countries with a view to rolling out the most successful initiatives
to its stores around the world. “In the US there is a push to implement a
gift card solution and if it works then we’ll roll out. It all depends on the
maturity of each market,” he says.
In France
Longchamp is introducing a passport reader that will capture customer
information when they enter the store and will be aimed at people visiting that
country.
The
ability to roll out such initiatives globally is made possible by the
implementation of the Cegid Business Retail solution across its many stores and
its online operations.
“We
needed to find a European solution and then we asked ‘what was our goal?’ It
was to go global, beyond Europe, and the ambition was for growth in the US,
Americas, Asia and Japan. For this we needed a system that we could implement
globally,” says Louit.
The
problem with other international brands, he suggests, is that they have to
operate different systems in the various countries in which they operate. They
then have the tough task of getting these disparate solutions to work together
in order that things like BI (Business Intelligence) and CRM can work more
effectively.
It is
also much harder to introduce localisation to each international website when
each is operating on different platforms supplied by various vendors.
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