Canadian Tire: CXBeacons
Background: Canadian Tire (Kanata), a leading retail chain, sought to innovate its customer engagement strategies by leveraging beacon technology. The goal was to enhance the in-store shopping experience, provide advanced customer service, and gather valuable insights into customer behaviour.
Problem Statement: Traditional retail experiences lacked personalization, leading to decreased customer engagement and missed opportunities for targeted marketing. Canadian Tire (Kanata) aimed to address these challenges by implementing beacon technology to deliver superior service to customers in real-time.
Research:
Market Analysis: Studied existing beacon technology implementations in the retail sector to understand best practices and potential challenges.
User Interviews: Conducted interviews with both in-store customers and online shoppers to identify pain points and preferences regarding personalized shopping experiences.
Competitor Analysis: Analyzed competitors' approaches to beacon technology and evaluated their strengths and weaknesses.
Design Process:
User Persona Development: Created detailed user personas representing different customer segments, including preferences, behaviors, and pain points.
Wireframing and Prototyping: Developed wireframes and prototypes of the mobile app interface, focusing on intuitive navigation, clear information display, and seamless integration of beacon-triggered features.
User Testing: Conducted usability testing sessions with target users to gather feedback on the app's design, functionality, and overall user experience.
Iterative Design: Incorporated user feedback to refine the app's interface, improve usability, and ensure alignment with user preferences and expectations.
Solution:
A mobile app was designed to summon and alert in-store assistance based on customers' location in the store and real-time location data from beacons installed throughout the store. Key metrics include:
Average daily calls: Reports on time, location, and number of triggers from any beacon on the network.
Average response time: How long staff took to respond and whether an instance was escalated to management.
On-the-fly updates: Edit properties (priority level, response time etc.) for any beacon at any time.
Real-Time Alerts: For large items customers receive SMS notifications for pick up time and location.
🏎 Faster service at the push of a button
Each employee has a store-issued phone with the app installed. When a customer initiates a service request, a notification is sent out indicating the department and aisle where help is required.
⚙️ Role selection
After login the staff member chooses which role(s) they are handling for that shift. Sales staff are typically the first responders and support staff and management play secondary roles to handle request overflows that happen during peak periods.
A user also can select more than one role as the on-duty manager may also be in a sales or support role.
📊 Management's Dashboard
Management can gain insight into various aspects of their customer's experiences with the beacons via the dashboard.
Designed for simplicity and quick reviews, it provides key metrics to allow the management team the ability to review and assess successes or shortcomings. This provides opportunities on the spot to react more efficiently to situations as they arise.
🧮 Average claims per day
🏃️ Average response time
🕐 Peak hours for better scheduling
🆘 Number of calls requiring support assistance
🛠 How the beacons work
The app allows for management to assign priority levels on individual beacons based on their purpose.
As an example, perhaps expensive items or items that are in seasonal high demand (Christmas trees) would be a level 1 priority while a quick task such as cutting chain could be a level 3.
Levels also have custom time limits for customer service rep response time. This is helpful when prioritizing beacons with longer "time to serve" situations. Helping a customer with a patio set vs mixing paint.
The average "time to serve" paint mixing is around 10 minutes, so, therefore, you can't leave the patio set customer unattended for that duration.
The staff would attend to the patio set customer first and then serve the paint customer. Now with the app support staff would be alerted to serve that paint customer as soon as possible.
🤡 Let's have some fun, eh?
One of the mandates from the client was to have some fun and personality injected into the design. This was achieved in a few different ways throughout the experience from copywriting to outcome screens like these.
✅ Reporting
Next to providing stellar customer service the most important aspect of the app was to provide performance insights to the management team. Useful for quickly adjusting to current market trends (*cough COVID-19*) and awarding over-achieving staff for exceptional work.
Management can see a great range of information and also export it if need be.
📆 Range of dates
🔘 Most active beacons
🚨 Busiest departments and aisles
🕐 Peak hours
Outcome:
Increased Customer Engagement: The implementation of the beacons led to higher levels of customer engagement and interaction.
Improved Sales: Resulted in increased sales of seasonal items and a higher than average extended warranty purchases.
Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Customers appreciated the improved experience and found the beacons helpful in requesting assistance and discovering new products.
Valuable Insights: Canadian Tire (Kanata) gained valuable insights into customer behaviour and preferences, enabling data-driven decision-making and targeted marketing and staffing strategies.
Future Considerations:
Continued refinement and optimization of the mobile app interface and beacon technology implementation to further enhance the customer experience and drive business growth. Additionally, ongoing monitoring of emerging technologies and consumer trends to stay ahead of the competition and maintain relevance in the rapidly evolving retail landscape.
Conclusion:
By leveraging beacon technology to deliver personalized experiences and service, Canadian Tire (Kanata) successfully transformed its retail environment, driving increased customer engagement, sales, and satisfaction. This user-centric approach to design and innovation positions Canadian Tire (Kanata) as a leader in the retail industry, poised for continued growth and success in the digital age.
