Symphony EYC, a global leader in delivering ROI for retailers and manufacturers using customer insights to drive execution, has just launched Symphony EYC Engage -- a next generation targeting analytics and loyalty campaign management platform. The new Engage platform reduces campaign complexity, automates many functions around campaign execution, and increases the accuracy required to design and develop highly effective segmentation and targeting of the most valuable customers.
Symphony EYC Engage enables retailers to engage the right customers at home, in store, at the checkout, or on the go. With purchase history, preferences and interests centralized, the platform delivers a quick, cost-effective way to improve customer retention, increase frequency of purchase and ensure a single view of the retailer for each and every customer.
Ellen Dixon, global EVP of marketing, Symphony EYC, told Loyalty 360 that the mission of the company was to bring together the notion of having deep analytics and having customer insights based on retailers’ transactional history as well as all customer interaction behavior.
“And take all those insights and drive all points of execution,” Dixon said. “We saw the biggest opportunity for this through omni-channel marketing communication and execution – focusing on the customer journey and making it more customer specific.”
The Symphony EYC Engage offering includes:
Targeting analytics – Sophisticated software tools help better understand and group customers for tighter segmentation and more effective offers.
Configurable customer information management – Flexible, customizable tools manage any customer information deemed important so that any or all information can be used for targeting.
Real-time or asynchronous transaction processing and analysis – All analysis, promotions, and loyalty rewards can be offered in real-time at any customer touch point, providing a seamless and uniform omni-channel customer experience.
Broadening the loyalty experience through omni-channel communication – Going beyond checkout-only or mailed loyalty rewards, Engage allows retailers to connect with their customer at any time through any communication channel, even while they are shopping.
Reporting, analytics, visualization, and actioning tools – In addition to tools to understand what is happening with customers, product, categories, brands, and stores, Engage also delivers visualizations coupled with tools to act on these insights in real-time.
By combining its deep analytics expertise with process management tools, Symphony EYC hopes to create a new generation of software solutions that drives customer insights to execution, providing a powerful thread through the retailer’s entire front- and back-office operations to drive true customer-centricity.
“As we’ve gotten more granular, we needed to make it engaging in real time,” Dixon added. “We set out to find that piece and really needed that end-to-end marketing enterprise platform to have a single centralized repository for transactional information and for all customer information. From that, we do the segmentation for the targeting analytics.”
What’s more, Dixon said the Engage platform allows for ad hoc definitions of customer groupings and analytics that break out individual groups based on specific attributes.
“It actually facilitates the execution of the campaign,” she said. “It can deliver campaigns to mobile devices, email, and in store.”
Dixon said there is a major retail trend toward the notion of customer specific marketing.
“Retailers need to stay true to their value propositions,” she said. “We recognize there are varying degrees of retail maturity and in the way of how personalized campaigns need to be given the different business models. Everyone wants loyalty and wants a positive experience. We’re continuing to make sure we’re always with our customer. With these types of tools, it’s listen, learn, plan, and execute.”
Dixon said the goal is to have a single view of the customer, a single view into the customer demand and preferences and being able to anticipate these specific offers and the demand for these customer specific offers and tie it back to the supply chain, inventory, and fulfillment.
“The data side is the easy side,” Dixon said. “It’s being able to predict and extrapolate that back in inventory strategies. Retailers have to place their bets with the inventory. The data side and analytics side is there. Now it’s more about retail strategies and aligning those with their brand promises.”
The inventory side for retailers is absolutely critical, Dixon said.
“It is the imperative to make this successful,” she said. “It comes down to inventory visibility from the retailer’s perspective and availability on that inventory. You can do all the customer specific marketing you want, but you needs to promise it and you have to be able to deliver on it.”