Retail Forum Barcelona 2025: AI and new channels enter the future of Retail

Visit Retail Forum in Barcelona once again brought together key industry players with a common goal: to imagine the future of retail. Among the speakers was our Customer Success Manager, Martha Suau, who shared her expertise on a central topic: CRM in the age of personalization, new channels and artificial intelligence.

Martha's presentation, based on customer case studies, reminded us that the success of a CRM strategy depends on the choice of an innovative platform adapted to its needs. She also stressed the importance of data as a strategic lever to better understand consumer expectations and create truly relevant experiences.

A speech that captured the audience's attention and reaffirmed our team's determination to place the customer experience at the heart of performance.

Turning every customer interaction into an opportunity

Martha began by pointing out that Splio's ability to address the entire customer marketing value chain, from data to activation, is a major advantage for retail brands.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Unifying customer data

Splio centralizes all customer data in its Customer Data Platformwhether transactional, behavioral or relational, to provide a 360° view of every contact in the database. This enables brands to better understand their customers and identify key moments in the relationship.

For example, for our customer Fusalp (a French luxury brand), the results speak for themselves: +55% in sales from CRM communications thanks to a pertinent use of customer data.

📨 Customer data activation

Since its creation, Splio has enabled over 500 retailers in Europe to activate their customer data either by sending newsletters or by creating automatic scenarios. Email routing and marketing automation are nothing new in digital marketing, but what makes our platform unique is the combination of the Customer Data Platform with our marketing automation platforms. Together, customer data takes on all the value it needs.

All the more so as our platform brings together all the distribution channels that today's retail brands need to communicate with their customers. We've always offered email and SMS. This year, we have innovated by adding WhatsApp to our distribution channels, as well as RCS (an enriched SMS where it is possible to add multimedia content where it was not possible until now with SMS).

"I work on a daily basis with Bodeboca, a Spanish pure-player in the wine industry. Bodeboca makes very precise use of the data it gathers every day, enabling it to activate the right customers with the right content, both to increase sales and to promote upsells. Bodeboca's CRM team is able, thanks to the data collected in our platform, to detect customers who buy top-of-the-range sparkling wine and steer them towards lower/middle-range champagne. A success story that has been with us for 10 years!

💞 Customer loyalty

Customer loyalty has always been the driving force behind brand CRM strategies. Over the years, it has taken many different forms. In the early days, it was mainly based on a close relationship and tangible rewards. And while these two foundations are still relevant today, a new one has been added: building loyalty in a thousand and one ways, via a multitude of channels.

At Splio, we believe that customer loyalty is no longer just a loyalty program. Loyalty now involves all interactions between a brand and its customer, where marketing automation plays a central role. That's why our loyalty engine Splio Loyalty loyalty engine is accessible directly from our platform. We've even made loyalty even more digital with the dematerialization of loyalty cards and coupons in customers' mobile wallet.

That's what coffee chain GoodNews is doing: the entire loyalty program has been developed within the Splio Mobile Wallet. All rewards/points are visible to the customer in their dematerialized card, directly in the heart of their smartphone. The same goes for member animation, since GoodNews sends push wallet notifications via our platform to inform its members of coffee shop news or current offers.

🤖 Optimizing CRM performance with AI

Over two years ago, Splio acquired Tinyclues to embed predictive marketing in our CRM platform. It was a bold move, as we were the first in Europe to boost our CRM with artificial intelligence. This year, AI is at the forefront of the international scene, and several major retail brands are using it alongside us.

In concrete terms, predictive AI in our platform enables CRM teams to delegate to AI the creation of unique audiences for each campaign created. It also helps to detect new communication opportunities.

KIABI uses our Predictive AI solution. In fact, the Spanish market served as the platform's testbed. For 4 months, the initial test consisted in running additional campaigns on top of the existing ones, targeting specific products. These campaigns were a bonus, but the results on all KPIs were very good: engagement KPIs were tripled and the churn rate divided by three. Since then, KIABI has extended the use of Predictive AI to all 5 of its markets, and today, campaigns whose audience is generated by Predictive AI account for 1/3 of sales generated by the CRM.

In a nutshell: Splio transforms customer data into lasting, profitable relationships, helping retailers to move from a simple transaction to a strong, engaging brand relationship, all within a single platform.

Use cases for AI in digital marketing

In the second part of her talk, Martha returned to the use cases of AI in digital marketing and CRM in particular. Artificial intelligence can be used to respond to a multitude of use cases (this is the value proposition of our predictive AI platform).predictive AI) :

🧽 D ata cleansing and enrichment: AI can automatically detect and correct inconsistencies in data, merge duplicates and enrich customer profiles with information from external sources. This is particularly the case when AI is used as part of a CDP.

✅ Better understanding of its core contacts: by analyzing behavioral patterns, AI can both identify early signs of customer disengagement, enabling targeted retention actions before it's too late, but also analyze behavioral patterns to anticipate future needs with greater precision and identify decision-making micro-moments.

🔮 Behavior prediction: by analyzing historical patterns, AI can predict future customer actions, enabling proactive interventions.

🧨 Dynamic segmentation: instead of static segments based on predefined criteria, AI can continuously create and adjust segments based on real-time behavior.

💌 Hyper-personalization on a grand scale: AI makes it possible to create unique experiences for each customer, anticipating their needs, recommending the right products and personalizing messages according to their purchasing context, even for millions of users simultaneously. AI is also capable of adjusting content, offers and recommendations in real time, based on the immediate context and history of the customer.

📱 Optimize communication channels: determine the best time and channel for each interaction, maximizing engagement.

⏰ Perfect timing of communications: by analyzing login and purchase habits, AI can determine the best time to send an email or push notification to each customer individually.

All these advances thanks to AI offer CRM managers the opportunity to free up their time on a day-to-day basis to refocus on the added value they have to bring to communications, maximize the impact of their CRM actions and build even greater loyalty among brand customers. AI does not replace marketers' creativity and intuition, but amplifies them.

To find out more about our CRM marketing platform, contact our teams !