It’s a term coined by The Good Guys CEO Michael Ford to describe the next generation of retail consumers. ‘ROBO customers’ are a tech-savvy group who research the products they are interested in online before physically going to the store to purchase. “85 per cent of the visitors to our website tell us that they are not intending to buy online,” Michael says. “This has led us to implement a connected retail strategy with the ROBO customer at its core.”
“Understanding our customers’ path to purchase and how they interact with technology is key to ensuring that we stay ahead of the curve. Over the past five years, our digital marketing investment has increased 1,000 per cent. The moment we quantified that more than 60 per cent of our store customers used our website before purchasing, we realised that the biggest opportunity for us was the ROBO customer.”
With this in mind, The Good Guys has chosen to power its business based on data, and then turn these insights into actions. Michael explains that there are two dedicated teams working on delivering this approach. The first is a data insights team, which is responsible for data management such as connecting sales data from the point-of-sales systems and customer master data, and gaining product information from Oracle Retail via an enterprise data warehouse. The second is the customer insights team, which is all about analysing the why behind a customer’s purchasing habits. This group provides recommendations on how to improve the shopping journey through the analysis of internal reports and external data sources like Google Analytics. Furthermore, managed surveys are conducted pre- and post-purchase to provide a means to gain powerful insights that strategic decisions can be based upon.
“Every one of our customers who makes a purchase with The Good Guys either instore or online has the opportunity to provide us with feedback on their experience,” Michael says. “This year, we have received feedback from 142,000 customers, which we use to measure the impact of various factors on our Net Promoter Score. The Net Promoter Score is the singular most important metric to measure customer satisfaction and preference to shop at any retailer. In addition to that, we invite visitors on our website who don’t make a purchase to participate in an industry tracker survey. All of this gives us the opportunity to see what has the greatest impact on Net Promoter Score and conversion, so we can change our approach according to how the customer behaves. We also use industry surveys from Nielsen to compare our scores with our competitors.”
