by Technology Innovators magazine – July 2021

 

Galen Walters, CEO, Relationshop

Galen Walters, CEO, Relationshop®, a leading digital shopper marketing company focused on the grocery retail industry delivers a retailer-proven shopper engagement platform to support personalized promotion and commerce. With more than 40 years of deep experience in the retail sector, he is creative, caring, authentic, and responsive. He believes that now is one of the most exciting times to be

in the grocery retail industry, as it is undergoing a transformative shift from mass to 1:1 and analog to digital engagement.  Relationshop, with its integrated, digital customer engagement platform, and easy to use, big-data, analytics solution & eMarketing services, is ideally suited to meet what’s happening now and coming next. Excerpts from an interview:

Relationshop – The Concept

Relationshop® partners with retailers to grow sales and increase customer engagement through personalized solutions. Galen notes that the company was the result of a rebranding of their original company, Go Think! Retail. “In 2019, our digital platform (that we created in 2011) became the driving force for our company, so we changed the name from Go Think to Relationshop®, acquired our development team in Vietnam, and focused 100% of our efforts on developing the future of the digital experience for the grocery industry. Go Think! Started in 2007 as a consultancy, and quickly turned into a software company at the request of our supermarket clients, and the rest is history.”

The Digital Experience Platform

“After the rebranding of the company to Relationshop®, there was a need to clearly distinguish the web and mobile platform we had developed, so we branded it as the Digital Experience Platform, or DXP”, observes Galen. DXP, a SAAS product, is a fully integrated web, mobile, commerce, eMarketing, and analytics digital platform.  It manages the entire digital experience of the shopper for the retailer and is fully tied into their POS and loyalty systems, as well as pertinent customer and product data. “A light-weight personalization app (and there are plenty to choose from) can offer a shopper a coupon based on what they purchased historically, but can’t begin to address the broader digital journey, as our DXP does, to truly grow the relationship between the shopper and the retailer.  That holistic engagement with the shopper throughout their journey is the future of retail.”

Retail Challenges Galore

According to Galen, the primarily issues being faced by the retailers today is related to their historical investment into their digital and data infrastructures. “So much attention is placed on POS, and rightfully so, that it is difficult for chains to find the talent or the time for their teams to focus on building a solid and sustainable digital infrastructure.” There is so much changing so quickly pertaining to data and cloud services, and so many chains are stuck in the recent past and not looking at tomorrow due to resource constraints (talent and financial). Secondly, a lot of retailers were trying to play digital through the ligh

tweight integration of widgets and personalization applications, and now find that they aren’t integrated as a platform and cannot support the more robust personalization now demanded by consumers.

 

Current Retail Technology Space

“It is the most exciting time to be alive in retail. Never has the retail industry had the impetus to change like they do today but, I will add that it is a bit later than it should have been. Had the industry taken the purchase of Whole Foods by Amazon, or the purchase of Unata by Instacart for the signal of change that they were, digital infrastructure changes should have been happening back in 2018 (or earlier) as technology became available and the convergence was clearly visible,” notes Galen.

The Success Mantra

Prioritization, setting great goals around People, Process, Partners and Performance to keep us intently focused, buckled to leadership framework of Why, What, How and Wow, have created a seamless management infrastructure that we all turn to daily for business continuity, adds Galen. “The team members are key to the technology advancement, the flawless execution, and customer satisfaction. I care about and for the team members deeply, and they then care about the product and customers deeply. It just works.”