Executive summary
Japanese retailer PARCO Co. Ltd.’s 3,000 stores use omnichannel personalization to fuel a retail marketing juggernaut. By combining data from its successful mobile app with information ranging from IoT data to Web browsing habits to weather info, the company is getting dramatic increases in retail sales and projected customer lifetime value (CLV). And Treasure Data Customer Data Platform makes it flexible, easy, and fast to create and update accurate customer profiles in real-time–for better targeting, segmentation, and customer journeys.
Challenges
Smartphone use is skyrocketing and eCommerce continues to flourish in Japan in the era of at-your-fingertips shopping convenience. But, Naotaka Hayashi, executive officer for the Group ICT Strategy Office of PARCO, isn’t worried. PARCO uses data to drive customers to stores and to support sales staff as they help customers and close sales.
“What we need to do is to understand the strength of shop staff, who can offer consultation to customers, and then take the sales interaction to the next stage. In the coming AI era, creative work will survive. Customer service is, by nature, creative work that makes the customer happy.”
Hayashi and his team support the 3,000 retailers operating in its shopping centers nationwide. With an eye to the future and the need for more data to fuel their customer engagement plans, the team at PARCO needed a way to empower customer service and marketing with deep, actionable shopper insights.
Solution
The PARCO team introduced an official shopping app, “POCKET PARCO,” which gave them more customer behavior data to help discover untapped opportunities for personalization and engagement. Treasure Data CDP ingests POCKET PARCO data, along with IoT data from shopping center weather and geofencing sensors, for real-time analysis and activation through the app.
Customers also play “store-walking” games on the app that lead them to visit stores they might like, and social media data is also used to help determine customer preferences. The effort has yielded invaluable insights, such as that customers who clip a particular shop blog article had a 35% higher tendency to visit that shop, and 25% of customers who received a store push promotion for a sale made a purchase. These actionable insights – and many others like them – have led to increased sales and CLV.
Results
By analyzing both customers’ reviews and purchases, PARCO found a correlation between a store’s favorable reviews and increased repeat visits. PARCO shares survey results with its retailers so they can address factors causing a low score and improve their overall customer experience.
As part of a constant effort to leverage data, one of PARCO’s initiatives targets first-time shoppers by encouraging them to visit the store again. According to Hayashi, data analysis showed a correlation between customers who made a second purchase within a month of their first purchase and a higher customer lifetime value.
After an initial purchase from a store, shoppers who haven’t returned within a certain timeframe receive a push notification inviting them to revisit that shop. An A/B test found that customers who received this notification had an 8 percent higher repeat-purchase rate than those who did not.
