By Paul Millette, Carousel Industries
For
arguably anyone in retail, the conversation of “delivering the ultimate
customer experience” is as prolific as discussions about inventory management,
supply chain operations and P&L statements. It’s top of mind as retailers
look to capitalize on industry white space, remain competitive in overly
saturated markets and see retention soar.
In
fact, Gartner contends that this year, more than 50% of organizations
will implement significant
business model changes in
their efforts to improve customer experience. This includes investing in the
right technologies, bringing uniform consistency across retail channels and
activating self-service tools. But amidst all the talk about the customer
experience has to be a conversation about big data — specifically the fact that
retailers need to rely on analytics as their No. 1 driver in bolstering the
customer experience.
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Before
retailers can even begin to pinpoint the tactics that will help move the needle
with customer experience, they must approach it with a “data-first” mentality. Critical
to this would be to develop the answers to questions like:
- How much time are your existing and prospective customers spending in either your brick-and-mortar facility, web site or both?
- Are your existing and prospective customers driven by a self-service or high-touch, people-centric model?
- How much traffic are you seeing outside your brick-and-mortar shop that you are missing the chance to market to?
- What’s the last page online shoppers visit before bouncing from your site and not completing a purchase?
Most
retailers essentially have two points of contact with customers: those inside
and outside the business, whether that’s virtual or physical. As such, the
questions become: how do you engage with them regardless of how they come in
contact with your business, and how can you glean pertinent data that will help
drive profit expediently?
For
instance, if a customer is in the makeup department of your store, how can you send
coupons to their mobile device in real time about a sale in the women’s shoe
department? Similarly, how can you push out coupons offering “20% off your
smoothie before 10 a.m.” right when a prospective customer walks by a
restaurant at 9:30 a.m.? It’s equally important to gain data that helps you better
understand existing customers as it is to understand the large swath of
customers you are missing daily and why.
When
constructing a strategy for making better use of customer analytics, it is
critical to keep the following in mind:
- Consider Cloud: Everybody is thinking about the cloud today — how to get into it and how to embrace cloud technologies with the least impact to their business and the flow of their business. Cloud data processing can provide a myriad of opportunities to retailers looking to get a handle on their big data to enhance agility, gain access to new data sources, store data cost-effectively and access it in real time.
- Aggregate Your Data: Many retailers have multiple locations. How can they unify their data into one central repository for swift, accurate decision making? Whether they’re looking to derive insight into inventory tracking, point of sale or supply chain logistics, having a common collection point for all data will allow retailers to quickly, efficiently and securely access their data.
- Make the Most of IT Resources: Too many retailers ignore the insight they can gain from big data simply because sifting through all the data can be cumbersome and overwhelming. If you fall into that boat, you may want to re-examine allocation of IT resources. Many retailers today are considering a managed services model for their big data processing. This approach allows them to focus on what’s most important on their corporate agenda, while a third-party expert handles the managed services piece of aggregating, mining and making sense of customer data.
While
the customer experience will always remain top of mind, the analytics equation
of the experience should not be an afterthought. Rather, it’s the governing
tactic to inform the changes and improvements required to optimize the customer
experience.
Paul
Millette serves as director of the executive sales development program and
retail industry lead for Carousel Industries. In these roles, he oversees ownership of sales planning, performance
metrics, forecasting, and reporting for the team. He has more than three decades
of sales leadership experience and has spent the last 10 years expanding the
Carousel sales development program to include strategic industry focus spanning
retail, financial, healthcare, insurance, government and education, among
others.
