SPECIAL FEATURE
Retail Real Estate User Engagement During “New Normalcy” to is disrupted. To remain viable, the challenges center not only around how well shopping centres respond to customer safety but rather how they continue to utilize the physical-digital-spatial sphere in facilitating wary customers. The picture on the right presents some key insights for shopping centres to elevate customer experience during this new normalcy. As a retail real estate placemaker, Propdea focuses on providing proactive and immediate-mobilizing solution models for clients to build resilience and reach their investment targets during these uncertain times. Fortunately, there are several tools and tactics available for shopping centre operators to engage with their users. Next, hear from Hyperin Inc. on how communication is key in nurturing both customer and tenant trust.
Tools of Engagement
T
he 2020 pandemic is predicted to have long-lasting effects on how we work, do business, and organize our everyday lives. The journey towards reopening got us reflecting: how does the retail real estate industry recover and evolve from here? One fundamental curiosity is how to respond to the transformed expectations of shopping centre users (i.e. tenants and customers). We identify this next chapter as “the new normalcy.” Returning to spend time at shopping centres has been a way for people to maintain some sense of normalcy. However, if lockdowns are forced to resume, digitally savvy customers will waste no time jumping on the e-commerce bandwagon again. Likewise, retailers continue to adopt new digital tools to attract shoppers. Tenants expect shopping center operators to diversify their digital practices and investin an omnichannel strategy to engage with customers and boost sales. Individual brands have demonstrated creative ways of exploiting their direct-to-customer strategies. While shopping center operators retreated to manage tenant-permanence and provide necessary safety measures for the pandemic-fatigued public. Shopping center-led innovations were hardly declared, if at all.
Re-mapping the customer journey Customer experience-centrism has been emphasized in retail real estate development for quite some time now. Under current circumstances, the customer journey retail real estate traditionally caters
RETAIL PEOPLE . OCT-DEC 2020 .22
Spring 2020 highlighted the importance of empathy. The common realization was that investing in tenant communication and empathizing with their distress increases tenant engagement and commitment to the landlord. However, tens or hundreds of tenants per property understandably overload managers. Thus, appropriate tools to support this relationship are crucial. After a shift in marketing tone, the new normalcy pushes us to get back to more aggressive campaigning to keep customers engaged. How? First, participating tenants in campaign planning are advised, involving tenants’ input in designing customer journeys around them. Second, as campaigns now have shorter time windows to react, processes must be adjusted accordingly to enable quick and dynamic operations. Understanding the performance of campaigns requires agile and well-integrated reporting tools, observing sales revenue, OCR, and other key indicators. Reviewing the results with tenants is
