Offering a personalized customer experience is an ideal way to begin building brand loyalty. However, this is just the starting point. The most successful brands realize that customer behaviors and expectations are always changing, and emerging technologies are constantly allowing for increasingly higher degrees of personalization and relevancy.
Offering a meaningful customer experience, therefore, means making an enduring commitment to consumers. This is especially important in the grocery industry where increased competition and customer fragmentation have made it extraordinary difficult to attract and retain loyal customers.
But these are challenges that Raley’s Family of Fine Stores is prepared to meet and overcome.
Raley’s, a family-owned supermarket chain with locations across California and Nevada, has always offered a personalized customer experience that rewards shoppers for the way they like to shop. But now, Raley’s is planning to take this approach even further with an expanded partnership with dunnhumby, a customer science and data analytics agency.
This expanded agreement will further bolster Raley’s already significant investment in customer experience by leveraging dunnhumby’s powerful suit of engagement tools, which will help generate a better selection of products based on shopper preferences.
By purposefully avoiding a traditional sales-based model, Raley’s will focus on delivering the promotions and products that shoppers are actually interested in, not on those that the brand is interested in pushing.
“We will continue to assess customer behavior to drive the critical business decisions we make to anticipate and ultimately meet our customers’ expectations,” Chelsea Minor, Raley’s Director of Public Relations & Public Affairs, told Loyalty360. “Understanding customer sentiment and the impact that has on their overall shopping experience will greatly influence our ability to be a leader in the grocery industry.
In this respect, dunnhumby seems to be the ideal partner to help Raley’s move forward with this initiative.
“dunnhumby understands Raley’s mission and are helping deliver a world-class experience to our customers,” Minor continued. “Its team members are integrated in our daily operations, which have enhanced our partnership and ability to use data to make real time decisions. We think of our dunnhumby partners as an extension of the Raley’s family. Their efforts are imperative to delivering on our customer promises.”
dunnhumby will leverage the behavior data needed to give Raley’s the ability to target customers on a deeper level, to anticipate their needs, and to deliver a value proposition that each customer finds relevant.
This process is also reflected in Something Extra, the brand’s consumer-centric and award-winning loyalty program. Something Extra also showcases the brand’s deep commitment to increase engagement by continually finding new ways to modernize customer interactions through a host of creative promotions and meaningful offers.
“dunnhumby has been a valued partner in the evolution of our Something Extra program,” Minor said. “At Raley’s, we are always looking for ways to improve the program to be relevant, useful and personalized for our customers.”
This approach builds upon a deeply rooted foundation that promises to make shopping, as the brand states, “easier, better, and more personal.” And it’s how Raley’s will continue to differentiate itself going forward.