Tring Understands Its Customers, Because It Understands Its Customers’ Customers
Tring offers a reinvented approach for retail by leveraging the power of in-store audio in ways that drive sales effectively. The difference lies in the level of service Tring delivers, and how the company can adapt to changing conditions through custom opportunities. That comes down to Sandy Barnes, who has helped build Tring into a loyalty powerhouse, one customer at a time.
“I work with customers on the advertising side when they want to do their in-store messaging,” Sandy says. “We create their brand ID in a 30-second snap, or they want to promote particular items or if they want to do something new. Right now, there’s a lot of focus on ‘buy online, pick up in store.’”
Making sure the message is to the customers liking is one thing, but using the expertise of the staff at Tring makes sure the customers in the store get the message too. Understanding the customer experience in the store is the key to understanding Tring’s own customers. That’s a big part of what Sandy does. “I’ve worked in all sorts of retail from Mrs. Field’s Cookies to Timberland to Stonewall Kitchen, even an apple orchard that had a store and baked their own apple pies, helping them with sales and customer service,” she says. “A friend had a small business, and I helped her set up her marketing and merchandising and just basically doing whatever was needed. That’s how I’ve learned to grow my role, determining what the needs are for each individual customer, to get the job done and make their shoppers happy.”
Tring has a wide range of customers, from small retailers with three or fewer stores to huge grocery chains who sell some products that have margins of pennies. “The team we have is very responsive, and we’re small,” Sandy says. “We’re fast, we can move on a dime, because we work really closely together.”
And as markets shift and change, retail operations need to tailor their needs, and Tring can play a big part in that brand shift, something the team understands very well. “Once upon a time, it was the instinct of a shopkeeper figuring out, This might be a big seller,” Sandy says. “We’re adapting to find ways to help those existing brick-and-mortar stores reach more of their customers and bring in the statistics that the vendors need to target market their products. The data is huge. But we can see, there are only good things ahead.”