Retail consumers do not put too much thought into the inner workings of “click and collect,” also known as “buy online, pick-up in-store (BOPIS).” It’s just another retail experience that the typical customer expects to go seamlessly. Of course the product you want is available in your chosen color, size and style, and of course it’s going to be ready when you want. Either an associate will run it out to your car, or it will be packaged up and waiting in a dedicated spot when you enter the store.
For a service that for all intents and purposes didn’t exist five years ago, BOPIS quickly became a retail staple. The key to making the experience seamless for the customer is a Golden Record, a real time, unified profile of a customer (or household) that lets a brand know everything there is to know about a customer. It is the difference between being able to meet or exceed consumer expectations for a seamless, end-to-end experience and falling short.
The building of a Golden Record is a key retail use case, a foundational requirement for maximizing cross-sell and upsell opportunities, reducing churn and building loyalty and customer lifetime value (CLV). Building a Golden Record is a core capability of a customer data platform (CDP). In a CDP Institute survey, 58 percent of CDP users said that their CDP delivered “significant value” and 88 percent of respondents claimed that a unified customer view (aka Golden Record) was its top benefit.
Digging a little deeper into BOPIS, we will explore how a Golden Record can make the difference between a routine, run of the mill experience and one that stands out.
What is a Golden Record?
A Golden Record (aka Customer 360) combines data from any source (website, mobile app, eCommerce platform, POS, social media, CRM, etc.) to form a unified record of a customer and the customer’s engagement with a brand across every touchpoint. It includes behavioral, transactional, demographic and preference data. With full contact and identity graphs, all attributes and all data aggregations, a Golden Record captures every possible customer signal. By using persistent database key management and applying data quality processes as soon as data enters the CDP – including advanced identity resolution and tunable matching and merging – a Golden Record provides a contextual understanding of a customer as the customer journey unfolds.
When used as the basis for orchestrating real-time decisions at the moment of interaction, a Golden Record is a key component that allows a brand to deliver next best actions in the cadence of a customer journey.
Golden Record + BOPIS = Next Level Personalization
All else being equal, using a Golden Record to enhance a typical BOPIS experience will profitably differentiate one customer from another.
In a standard BOPIS experience, a brand at a minimum has to integrate a POS system with inventory. And while it’s technically possible to execute a run of the mill BOPIS experience without introducing friction into the customer experience by making sure the right product is indeed reserved and ready when the customer arrives at the store, a Golden Record brings the experience to the next level.
A Golden Record takes it to the next level because, knowing everything there is to know about the customer, a brand provides a hyper-relevant experience that aligns with a customer’s expectations. The brand sends customized SMS notifications and reminders because that is the customer’s preferred method of communication. The brand recommends the best time for a pick-up based on local traffic patterns. Or, because the brand knows it is a high-value customer with a high average monthly spend, it offers same-day delivery. Knowing the customer is picking up bathroom tiles – and knowing the customer just last week bought a drop-in sink – the brand includes with the order an educational brochure on do-it-yourself projects and offers a discount on vanities.
At every turn, the brand provides a welcomed next best action that enhances the experience by being relevant and timely. From the customer’s standpoint, they’re receiving unexpected value. They see that the brand values them as a customer beyond the transaction. And that is why retailers invest in a CDP. In a 2023 Medallia market research study, 82 percent of consumers say that personalized experiences influence the brand they end up purchasing from in at least half of all shopping situations. Moreover, CX leaders are 26X more likely than laggards to report YoY revenue growth of 20 percent or more.
One Redpoint CDP customer focused on building out a differentiated BOPIS experience using the Golden Record to great success. The multi-brand retail group, an international home improvement company, uses the Redpoint CDP to validate, transform and match consumer and trade professional data (from 38 sources) for roughly 18 million consumer and business identities. Creating a Golden Record through associated profiling, loyalty, consent, transaction, web behavior and contact history data, the retailer executes upsell and cross-sell campaigns with offers that are in the cadence of an individual customer journey as part of the BOPIS experience.
For more on how Redpoint helps retailers ignite their customer data through the building of an industry-leading Golden Record click here.
