In recent years, the retail landscape has shifted from a focus on recovering from a global pandemic, which accelerated the need for digital transformation, to a resurgence of shoppers returning to physical stores. The market has regained momentum, presenting a wealth of opportunities for retailers who have embraced omnichannel solutions. In this article, we’ll examine how department stores can unlock new opportunities by building a strong customer engagement strategy that integrates and streamlines their operations both in-store and online.
Creating new reach-out opportunities
One of the best ways to create customer engagement is by multiplying the moments when shoppers can interact with a brand or product. While doing so in the physical world can be costly (billboards, marketing activations, pop up stores, event appearances), it can be easier to do so on the internet by leveraging social media presence and by adding communication channels on your website.
What we suggest:
- Maximizing conversions
By enabling shoppers and potential customers to engage in live chats and schedule appointments with specialists, retailers can streamline customer profiling and offer tailored product recommendations simultaneously. Additionally, allowing customers to book in-store appointments in advance creates opportunities to increase foot traffic and enhance the overall shopping experience.
- Leveraging social media presence
For many industries in retail, social media is still a big factor of influence as well as an incredible engagement opportunity. Amongst Millennials and Gen Z, social media is widely used as a way to discover new products, beating out most search engine platforms. But one of the things social media doesn’t fully accomplish is filling the need for local presence and personalization.
At Salesfloor, we developed solutions that guarantee department stores and retailers are able to fine-tune their offer and successfully reach a local audience while also taking advantage of their social media presence.
Customer boards
Allows sales representatives to create personalized, shoppable web pages intended for specific clients and displaying their product recommendations. Clients can remain in contact with a specific salesperson using this platform and by sharing their thoughts and favorite items with the sales representative in this custom-catered web page.
Storefronts
Allows sales representatives to create a web page displaying their personal top picks and product suggestions that they can advertise to local audiences through their social media. What is important to note is that while storefronts are not personalizable to the client, it becomes a local influence platform.
Store communications
Allowing individual stores associates to send sms and emails to specific customers has proven an effective way to keep customers engaged. One of the most effective strategies to improve customer engagement has been proven to be the 2-2-2 (or sometimes 3-3-3) strategy, easily implemented using Salesfloor. This strategy consists in sending a communication to the shopper 2 days after a first buy, 2 weeks after and 2 months after, while suggesting personalized products and announcing store special sales or promotions.
One of our most successful clients, a renowned Beauty industry company, explained that one of the key factors that improved their conversions rate as well as overall engagement and sales, has been the ability Salesfloor provides for customers to engage through different channels.
“Salesfloor offered us exactly what we wanted and had the flexibility to meet our growing needs. Our favorite parts are the store widget, the storefront and the one-to-one interactions.”
Lindsey W. Director of Cosmetic Operations
Optimizing operations, a scalable strategy for growth
A common challenge many department stores have to face is the complexity of juggling between multiple platforms used for various store operations, such as inventory, point-of-sale systems, marketing operations, and more. It can create obstacles to gaining a clear, unified view and understanding how different processes interact with one another. According to McKinsey reports, one of the big differentiators between most successful and least successful retail businesses in 2024, especially in the apparel and sporting goods industries, lies in their ability to streamline their operations through a unified platform and being able to adapt their growth strategies accordingly.
When stores share data with one another, store associates can gain valuable insights into customers’ shopping habits, such as previous purchases and preferences, even if it happened in another branch. Once the client has reached out, having the back story can allow the sales representative to provide more personalized assistance and make recommendations that better align with the shopper’s tastes and needs during future interactions. Salesfloor allows retailers to automatically create such customer profiles through the use of the Connect™ widget we mentioned earlier.
Personalizing customer engagement
In order to maximize the effectiveness of outreach, Salesfloor has developed features that allows retailers to track clients buying history, average basket size, favorite brands and product categories. With that knowledge, visible between every branch, sales representatives gain a crucial insight. But how do we take advantage of these insights in a scalable way?
Salesfloor developed tasking automation, allowing salespeople to know when to send reminders, answer questions, suggest related items and more, in a scalable and organized way. This crucial feature has shown tangible results in terms of sales and customer engagement. In 2024, we compiled the results of numerous stores using tasking automation and the results spoke for themselves: The branches that resolved the most tasks proportionally, were always the ones that grew the most year-over-year.
Using AI in a customer engagement strategy
According to Gartner, 86% of CEOs expect AI to help maintain or grow their revenue in 2024-2025 and, when asked exactly how that would happen, the top answer category was improvement to customer experience and relationship.
Salesfloor developed Maestro AI™, a new conversational AI specifically designed to answer this need for retailers and department stores to fill the gap between the in-store and online customer service experience and allow them to assist shoppers 24/7 in an autonomous, human-like way.
Its core features include:
- Sales Large Language Models: A retail-specific, proprietary shopping intelligence Conversational AI that will use the best-in-class customer interactions based on 10 years of successful, real-life conversations that translated into sales.
- Visual Browsing: Salesfloor’s Maestro AI™, is able to create visual suggestions that shoppers can browse.
- Connected inventory: Maestro AI will never suggest an item that is unavailable, ensuring client satisfaction and no unexpected delivery delays.
- Smart product tagging: Our conversational AI comes with an integrated smart tagging, allowing it to decipher the type of product, category and other variables that a client might request. Post-conversation, it will apply a visual tagging on the website’s products that aligned with the shopper’s requests.
While a conversational AI does not completely replace the need for human interactions, Maestro is the perfect example of how we can be as close as possible to a real shopping assistant: with the ability to answer questions, recommend products, remember previous interactions and more. This allows retailers and department stores to bring the in-store experience online 24/7. What sets it apart from other chatbots is its foundation in extensive retail-specific training and its integration with an omnichannel system that seamlessly shares data across different operations.
In conclusion
We believe that 2025 will be a great year for retailers and department stores who will leverage the trends of personalization along with a scalable outreach strategy. Customer engagement will occur by being able to connect with customers through multiple channels in a streamlined and scalable way. We hope our suggestions will help you achieve your growth goals. If you are interested in learning more about Salesfloor’s technology, don’t hesitate to reach out to one of our Clienteling specialists.
If you are interested to see how Salesfloor can help you get a competitive edge by boosting your sales operations through clienteling, don’t hesitate to request a demo with one of our specialists.
