The greater value of integrating CRM with AI lies in insight and prediction. First, AI-powered CRM systems help operations teams pre-process various types of member data, including spending and behaviour, to identify the attributes, characteristics and behaviours that distinguish high-value members in shopping centres. Second, these systems can analyse millions of member attributes to assess churn risk among high-potential members, tag those at high risk of churning, and analyse the underlying causes of potential churn.
In recent years, customer attrition in brick-and-mortar retail and stagnant growth have made acquiring new customers increasingly costly and risky. As a result, tapping into the existing customer base and optimizing the consumption experience to grow repeat customers has become key to the operational growth of shopping malls.
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is used to build a membership system, primarily implementing tiered management of customers based on their spending. Marketing tactics such as points feedback, promotions, and coupons are employed to enhance member stickiness and engagement. However, operations personnel are not only involved in participating in and tracking marketing campaigns—they also devote significant effort to data collation, data analysis, and the production of review reports. With numerous tasks such as identifying high-value members, planning effective marketing campaigns, and tracking the customer experience, executing efficiently and at low cost has become a difficult undertaking.
Therefore, the combination of AI and CRM delivers value not only by automating business processes to improve operational and analytical efficiency, but more importantly by providing operators with more intelligent decision-making guidance for member retention, grounded in machine learning algorithm models and data analysis.
How should we define the next-generation Tech-Trans CRM?Exploring an entirely new membership model with AI
AI can be summarized as inputting datasets and instructions into a computer and having it simulate human thinking to output decisions and reasoning conclusions. Tech-Trans believes that, beyond serving as a process-assistance assistant, the greater value of combining CRM with AI may lie in acting as an "operations assistant" with strong capabilities in learning, prediction, and decision optimization. Its "intelligence" is primarily derived from multi-dimensional datasets, and these capabilities accelerate the construction of CRM-based member retention analysis models, thereby delivering intelligent services with industry application significance.
1. Effective Insights: AI-Powered Identification of High-Value Members
AI enables a system to complete relevant tasks through observation, analysis, and practice, without manual intervention. In a CRM system without AI, the work of member identification requires operations personnel to manually and repeatedly collate and organize massive volumes of multi-dimensional member data every day—marking, cleaning, and grouping the data—to filter out valuable members. However, member status and consumption behavior at shopping malls are dynamically updated; relying solely on manual maintenance makes it difficult to ensure efficiency and stability.
The empowerment of AI technology is undoubtedly an excellent solution to the problems above. AI can, based on the CRM system, help operations personnel preprocess member consumption and behavioral data, performing data cleaning, feature extraction, weighted processing, cluster analysis, and type definition. AI-driven data preprocessing can span the entire member lifecycle, cross-analyzing and calculating multi-dimensional data such as members' experience points, spending power, purchase frequency, and membership tenure, and finally performing cross-validation to verify prediction accuracy and provide feedback. After data preprocessing, a model is built to assess the member value coefficient, from which it is determined what attributes, characteristics, and behaviors define a high-value member of a shopping mall.
A CRM system empowered by AI works like a dedicated and conscientious "operations assistant," providing operators with insights, accelerating information processing and retrieval, and customizing workflows—enabling more efficient identification of high-value members, reducing the time the team spends on predictable, repetitive work, and allowing greater focus on serving high-value members to continuously contribute to performance.
2. Early Warning of High-Potential Churn Risk
Compared with traditional intelligent systems based on manual experience and fixed rules, a CRM system empowered by AI will rely more on deep learning algorithms and modeling to provide real-time predictions and member retention strategy recommendations. One can envision that AI technology may analyze millions of different historical and real-time member attributes to develop "statistical-model-based" member retention analysis, assess the churn risk of high-potential members, tag members at high risk of churn, and analyze the underlying causes of potential churn—providing operators with greater foresight and continuously optimizing and upgrading personalized marketing strategies.
For example, based on each member's risk status (stable period, risk period, churn period), operations personnel can implement differentiated management and marketing pushes:
For members in the stable period, implement routine management.
For members in the risk period, implement "yellow light" management: monitor them closely and provide care activities such as promotional offers and holiday surprises, with close attention paid to daily reports for this group of members.
For customers in the churn period, implement "red light" management: conduct manual communication and organize interviews based on actual circumstances to identify the reasons for churn and improve the overall user experience.
It is foreseeable that this kind of intelligent predictive capability will, in the future, permeate the member tiering operational workflows of the Tech-Trans CRM system, greatly enhancing the timeliness with which operations personnel follow up on members—particularly providing highly valuable decision-optimization references for the maintenance of high-value members and win-back marketing for churned members.
There is no doubt that AI-empowered CRM iterative development will "fundamentally transform the CRM user experience."
In the future, in the face of the AI wave, Tech-Trans will embrace AI with a positive mindset. Through continuous technological research and innovation, we will empower our full product line—including intelligent CRM, intelligent CDP, and intelligent ERP—with AI technology, and work to build an ecosystem covering all business scenarios, making it possible for AI to empower business success and creating greater value for our enterprise customers.
If our goal is the stars and the sea, then our journey has only just begun.
About Tech-Trans
Founded in 1986, Tech-Trans has focused on commercial digitalization for 40 years. To date, the company has delivered more than 3,000 commercial projects, with over 100,000 POS terminals installed. Its business covers a wide range of formats, including commercial complexes, airport retail, cultural and tourism districts, and chain brands. Its clients include more than 1,000 enterprises, such as Capital Airports Holdings Co., Ltd., Beijing Capital Group Co., Ltd., China Resources Land Limited, Greentown China Holdings Limited, Wangfujing Group Co., Ltd., Douyin, China CITIC Bank Corporation Limited, and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited.Its product portfolio spans Commercial ERP, CRM, Smart POS, Data Middle Platform, Customer Data Platform (CDP), Precision Marketing Platform, Data Asset Management Platform, and Business Intelligence (BI) analytics, together with digital-intelligent construction, upgrade and transformation services.