METRO.digital: How a wholesale company offers every customer a personalised shopping experience
Data-driven analyst and risk-taking innovator. Those might sound like contradictory stances, but I think you need to be both. For over 20 years, I have used data to develop innovative, forward-looking customer experiences. I started my career in start-ups and mid-sized companies, but with METRO I’ve joined one of the largest and most important retail organizations in Europe.
I quickly realized that wholesale companies like METRO share many of the challenges faced by all retailers. Customers expect relevant offerings and services that meet their individual wants and needs. Only then will they see us as a valuable partner, not just a supplier, whose offers and services they can trust.
We must first analyse what our B2B customers in the hotel, restaurant, and catering industries want and need. We need to keep our eyes, ears, and data sources open to gain knowledge about their purchasing behaviour by using historical data, understanding their needs, listening to feedback, and analyse reactions to communication and all available sorts of behavioural data. Then we need to accompany them throughout the entire customer journey, across all online and offline channels, to give them what they want in real-time. It’s what our customers expect, and if we don’t give them what they want, our competitors will.
We consider personalisation as a mandatory part of our business in order to be relevant to all of our customers by providing data-driven product and service recommendations. Our diverse customer base and operations across countries require a suitable technical infrastructure to drive this. I am pleased to have Adobe as a digitalisation partner with strong platform expertise on our side, enabling us to support these efforts effectively. Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) gives us the tools that we need to achieve personalisation goals by providing us with a 360-degree view of customers and expanding our real-time capabilities.
https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/3439351
Here is a short video I did with Adobe, showcasing how we deliver personalised shopping experiences for our customers, even as a wholesale company, using Adobe CDP.
The 360-degree view pays off for our customers and for us
By analysing who our customers are and what they want, we can serve them quickly across all channels. Customers receive offers for products and services tailored just for them from the first moment they interact with us. We help customers by addressing them as individuals.
From our perspective as a wholesaler, delivering more personalised experiences is a win-win situation. Customers are more satisfied and loyal. That translates into better conversion rates and higher sales for us. The increased efficiency also helps us grow our returns as we can deploy more targeted resources.
The potential of AI for a seamless customer journey
Data is the key to our ambition to deliver relevant experiences at scale. We have started a new era of personalised real-time brand experiences at all touchpoints along the customer journey which is made possible with Adobe Real-Time CDP. Customer AI, an embedded AI feature in Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform, leverages AI-based algorithms to help us process large amounts of data from prospects and customers in real-time. With the insights provided by AI, we can match customers with the right offers in fractions of a second. Generative AI takes it a step further by providing tailor-made offers for customers on just the right channels.
We can also use AI to look beyond individual preferences and explore trends across all customer behaviour, allowing us to dynamically adapt our marketing campaigns depending on market preferences.
We could never be as effective with traditional data analysis as we are today with AI. Historical data is valuable and provides valid insights, but not always the ones we need right now. We could potentially miss the most impactful times to interact with our customers. The fact is, if you want to offer personalised shopping experiences in real-time, you need AI for speed, accuracy, and scale.
Roland Maisenhälder, Vice President Customer & Sales Solutions, METRO.digital, likes to shake up things! As an experienced leader, he knows how to inspire people to continuously challenge their ambitions at all levels of execution. With almost 20 years of experience in the digital economy, he is an analytical and numbers-driven visionary with a deep passion for agile leadership and digital product development that puts the customer first.
Since April 2023, he is leading all customer facing solutions at METRO.digital, the digital subsidiary of the renowned German wholesale company METRO.
