By Sergio Jiménez Delgado, Systems & New Technologies Director NEINVER
NEINVER embraced digital innovation and explored innovative solutions many years ago, and it is still steadfastly committed to digital transformation. The company’s approach is focused on understanding and anticipating consumer spending patterns using cutting-edge tracking systems to learn how our customers move and shop across all of our centers. That is why we continuously strengthen our capabilities by implementing innovative technologies that contribute to the value creation of our brand partners and to successful tenant partnerships.
One of the most recent and innovative projects is Athena, a unique digital ecosystem that makes it possible to understand consumer shopping behavior in real time and with a high degree of precision. NEINVER has developed a proprietary tool whose potential lies in the combination of various technologies that make it possible to obtain accurate information about the consumer, collect individual transaction data, and gain insight into the customer journey throughout the entire shopping experience. That will have a major impact on improving tenant performance, driving center business performance, and adapting to consumer needs.
“The ability to track performance without having to wait for special Reports is key.”
Using geolocation systems, NEINVER analyzes how visitors move around the centers, which stores they visit and for how long, which areas are the busiest, and much more. Transaction trackers developed ad hoc have made it possible to automate the collection of store sales data in a non-invasive way, providing very valuable information in real time, with a much lower error rate, thereby relieving store staff of this task. A new customer loyalty program, Lifestylers, also makes it possible to monitor customer behavior, which provides unique insight and understanding with regard to which customers are interacting and engaging with a given brand. The data is integrated into a single CRM system, and comprehensive knowledge of each consumer’s habits and preferences is obtained. With all of that knowledge, NEINVER can adapt aspects such as the commercial offer, the best location for brands, shop windows, services, and the sending of personalized offers, among others.
In addition, in line with the collaborative approach that characterizes our relationship with our brand partners, we have launched Minerva, an advanced retail analytics tool. It is being implemented across our portfolio and enables retailers to easily access and monitor detailed performance data of their stores on a daily basis, offering insight that enables them to make more-informed business decisions. This business intelligence solution, a NEINVER proprietary tool, will contribute to improving brand partners’ results across the 21 centers the company operates in Europe.
Data can be analyzed at any time
The all-in-one analytics dashboard, which collects, measures, and analyzes sales data at both the center and in-store levels, now provides analytics from the day after close of business. That allows retailers to evaluate performance against previous time periods on a daily basis and benchmark it against peers within the outlet or at the portfolio level, using multiple rankings provided in the tool: Retailers can track the percentage of new visitors versus repeat visitors as well as the frequency of visits to stores, the number of center visitors who actually visited a particular store and how many of them made a purchase after visiting a store, the average amount of a receipt or the number of items included in a single receipt, and so on.
Data can be viewed and analyzed at any time, because it is cloud-based and accessible from any device, so decisions can be quickly made from anywhere. The ability to track performance without having to wait for special reports allows for an almost immediate response, which is key.
In addition, the data obtained helps us, as operators, to better support the management of each store as well as entire retail centers. They make it possible to evaluate the activity of a particular store, to assess which promotional activities are worth investing in, or to support operational decisions on staff management.
With such innovative technologies, the reinforcement of our social media strategy and the rollout of new services, such as virtual shopping, click & collect, and appointment reservations, NEINVER has succeeded in transferring the same opportunities offered by online retail to shopping centers, thereby responding to one of the sector’s greatest challenges.
