Preferred customer programs:  Every retail organization has preferred customers.  Recognition of preferred customers may only be a greeting by name when a preferred customer enters the store.  It may be setting aside a piece of new merchandise for a customer to examine based on the customer’s prior product purchases.  However, in today’s customer-centric retail environment, preferred customer programs typically involve some sort of customer registration, special shopping opportunities, enhanced service, loyalty rewards, or a combination of all these components and more. 

Online preferred customer programs can be equally effective and as easy to manage.  Keep the registration process to the absolute minimum.  Remember consumers have grown very wary of sharing personal information online.  Name, minimal shopping preferences, e.g. product categories, brands, specific size, color, quantity or other product characteristics, and the customer’s preferred contact information are all that you really need.  You can offer the option of also registering delivery information, secondary contact information, and preferred payment method information.

Do not discriminate in preferred customer program value between customers that register the minimum amount of information and those that give you more details.  It is your customer’s patronage, not their willingness to share personal information, that creates a preferred customer.  And never ever share preferred customer information with any organization or individual outside the smallest possible group of trusted employees responsible for maintaining your preferred customer program.

What privileges will your online preferred customers enjoy?  The simple answer is that your online preferred customers should enjoy all the service advantages, special shopping opportunities, and other rewards available to your other preferred customers.  Your webstore development team can easily create a one or more preferred customer pages in your webstore, accessible by your choice of customer name, contact information, or unique password.

Have the log-in to your preferred customer pages available on every page of your webstore.  Depending on the selection criteria you are using to identify and register preferred customers, you may want to use the log-in box to promote the availability of your preferred customer program and program benefits.  Don’t make logging into your preferred customer webstore pages too difficult or your preferred customers will lose interest.  For this reason, you may want to avoid a unique password system as password fatigue is becoming a burden for every computer-connected consumer.

Your webstore’s preferred customer pages can offer unique products, special pricing opportunities on regular merchandise, products in limited supply, discontinued and remainder products, and added-value premiums with purchase.  Preferred customer pages can display advance notice of upcoming promotions.  Preferred customer pages can offer special services such as free delivery, buy it and try it, merchandise holds, a preferred customer telephone hotline number or email address, and more.

If your preferred customer program includes a reward system, make sure your preferred customers can get access to their up-to-date reward tally and what their next reward opportunity will be.

Personalized shopping:  Perhaps the single greatest challenge to the continued expansion of the online retailing channel is the consumer’s concern for the privacy of her personal information and the security of her credit card information when making a purchase.  We will discuss each aspect of personal information privacy and security during this VIEWPOINT series.  In this edition, we are going to look at personalized shopping, a valuable customer benefit if managed properly.

Personalized shopping is intended to guide the customer to those products and services from within the entire selection of products and services offered at your webstore, as personalized shopping would provide in your real-world store.  

The most common way today for webstore operators to create a personalized shopping experience is to track a registered customer’s purchasing history and to transparently present the customer with merchandise selections based on this shopping history.  There are many flaws in this approach, starting with the almost certain distortion of future merchandise presentations based on past purchases the customer made for others.

We suggest instead that your webstore offer a simple process by which the customer can “respond” to online questions or cues in much the same way she would respond to a sales associate in your real-world store, which will enable your webstore to guide her to the product selection she is interested in viewing.  Build your question or cue process following the qualification process used by your sales associate.