Amidst Customer Experience Obsession, Don’t Overlook Importance Of Analytics
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.
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.