Overview & challenges
Ahold Delhaize is a global retail chain with a global presence of 8,000 stores. With over 63 million visits per week at these stores, it is important for the retail giant to not only offer seamless Wi-Fi connectivity in their stores, but also gain a thorough understanding of their customers in order to reach out to them with relevant and even personalized offers, reminders and loyalty programs.
According to Mattias Demeyere, IT Product Owner at Ahold Delhaize, Cisco Spaces turned out to be both an obvious choice and an easy deployment, because of their existing Cisco network infrastructure, delivering value to IT as well as business teams.
Creating customer personas & delivering contextual engagements
One of the top priorities for the retail chain was ensuring that they drive loyalty by delivering a personalized shopper experience. Through Spaces OpenRoaming, the retail chain was able to provide customers easy, zero click access to store Wi-Fi, which eventually led to an increase in downloads of their mobile application.
Thanks to Spaces, we’re able to get in touch with clients to engage with them and to create what we call personalized, personas. So, we know if a customer is a frequent weekend visitor, or if they are a daily visitor, and we get insights into shopping habits like how often they visit and how much time they are spending in store.
– Mattias Demeyere, IT Product Owner, Ahold Delhaize
By integrating the Spaces SDK with their own mobile app, Ahold Delhaize is now able to create customer personas (based on when, how often they visit, their dwell time, etc) and engage with them in a relevant way via push notifications, as the buying decision is being made. This also enables the store to offer customers healthy product recommendations based on their buying habits – an ode to their core values of eat well, save time and live better.
Cisco Spaces was implemented to provide seamless connectivity for the customers. The game changer here is that the moment the customer walks into the store, we know that the customer is there. So we can influence or trigger purchasing behavior. We can surprise them with hyper personalized promotions or a shopping reminder.
– Rolf Vanden Eynde, Head of Tech, Stores & Technology, Ahold Delhaize
CRM integration with the Spaces API
Ahold Delhaize uses Salesforce for customer relationship management and thanks to the Spaces API, integrating with this tool was simple and effective. This helps them process which offers are relevant for which customers, in real time. “The way we are able to connect Cisco Spaces to Salesforce is very important, because it enables us to link which message the customer is entitled to in real time. This delivers real value as we’re able to talk to people where it matters the most,” says Gina Verhasselt, Digital Customer Interactions Director at Ahold Delhaize. “We want our customers to come back to our application every time they go shopping and so having that weekly rendezvous in the application is super important,” she adds.
Spaces is about making sure our customers can connect and reconnect easily to our store Wi-Fi, and also for customers to receive relevant messages in store about deals they can activate, so that they don’t miss out on any promotion.”
– Gina Verhasselt, Digital Customer Interactions Director, Ahold Delhaize
In the future, Ahold Delhaize hopes to capitalize on the increased accuracy of Ultra Wide Band to deploy indoor wayfinding across their stores, too. “What’s super exciting for me today, is the journey we are on. You see technology evolving so fast. There’s so many opportunities to really make a difference and to be relevant in our customers’ lives. And I think we are just at the beginning, so eager to fast forward and to see where we can land,” Gina shares.
