There is no doubt that the pandemic evolved eOrdering (the ability for a brand to accept orders across all channels) into a necessity. It was meant to happen of course, it is just that the pandemic accelerated this evolution.
The initial winners of this were as we all know the aggregation platforms, and the likes of Deliveroo, Foody, eFood, Amazon etc saw their revenues skyrocket. The platforms have a lot of value to offer to the merchants and are an important delivery channel. But unless blended in with a direct-to-consumer strategy they are more a liability than an asset, resulting in customer loyalty reduction, increased costs, reduced margins and overdependence to a third party.
So welcome to post pandemic chapter II. Merchants need to focus on their most valuable asset, “The Customer”, and not outsource them to the platforms. They need to keep the aggregation platform channels but for a minority of revenue. The majority of their revenue should come from a direct engagement with their customers and their own branded systems. Systems that build sticky customer relationships and provide differentiated service levels based on customer value and personas.
CRM.COM offers a cloud based solution that combines sophisticated rewards, payments and eOrdering that is easy to setup and deploy. The merchant can do proper direct-to-customer delivery and engage directly with their customers, identify them, offer to them rewards and promotions and keep their history to determine preferences and personas.
From a business case perspective, the customer gets a personalized service direct from the merchant or brand and the merchant gets sticky (repeat) revenue at a lower transaction cost than any platform.
eOrdering and Rewards Chapter II is here.
