Five Breakthrough Data-Driven Strategies To Win Retail Customers For Life
By Deesean Wilson, DXC Technology
Digital technology has had a profound effect on the retail industry, an effect demonstrated by the importance and utility of data. Cracking open this treasure of new insight on consumers, distribution, margins and trends — both emerging and fading — has created new ways retailers can expand and serve their customer bases.
Cloud, social media, online shopping, advanced analytics and data management are enabling retailers to glean new insights and capabilities to reach further into existing markets and cultivate new ones. To harness and serve this powerful new consumer reality, forward-looking retailers are creating more responsive, value- and customer-driven business models, supported by increasingly agile and collaborative supply chains.
This new digital customer engagement creates and supports the digital-savvy consumer’s immersive retail experience, while allowing retailers to refine all aspects of that experience. They’re redefining engagement as an ongoing process that doesn’t end with a purchase, but actually inspires the next one.
How Retailers Can Enhance The Digital Shopping Experience
A successful data-driven strategy depends on implementing a single digital platform that supports five entry points to digital customer engagement: customer experience, customer behavior, customer service, customer relationship and customer fulfillment. The journey can begin and end at any of these points, allowing retailers to optimize the experience for each consumer.
Curating Digital Experience And Services: The Five Points Of Digital Customer Engagement
- Customer experience. Combine a shopper’s in-store experience with apps and interactive devices to make the overall experience more intriguing and personal. Such interactions create new pathways to vital data about contextual shopping behavior and preferences that can be applied effectively at the individual level.
- Customer behavior. Monitor customer satisfaction and patterns to predict behavior and purchase propensity. By engaging customers regularly in a way that is relevant to them, retailers can earn their trust, collect more data and develop merchandising and promotional strategies around customers’ needs.
- Customer service. Keeping data current helps retailers know their customers, what they want and how they prefer to get it. By refocusing on and continually capturing data from all customer contact points, retailers can confidently create a positive shopping experience from introduction to delivery. Such a commitment to service will build databases as well as loyalty.
- Customer relationship. Because today’s digital-savvy consumers are accustomed to multiple ways to order, purchase, save on and receive merchandise, retailers can implement technologies to gain further insights at every stage of the customer engagement cycle. Doing so can help build new, custom touch points that show an understanding of each customer’s preferences and ensure that they feel valued and unique.
- Customer fulfillment. With the right data-driven enterprise resource planning and optimization tools, retailers can use analytics-driven insights to predict shopping behavior and improve inventory planning, assortment management and product placement. Online, these insights can help a retailer rework their page displays, collections and search functions.
The Optimum Platform For Consumer Data Strategies
The digital experience can be mastered by aggregating and analyzing data to develop effective and actionable strategies that keep up with the digital-savvy consumer. Retailers must adopt a more agile, technology-driven model for innovation that builds on current resources but also accepts proven bolt-on technology as soon as it’s available. To analyze data in meaningful ways, these tools need to be accessible at any time, from any location, and in a context that makes sense to the user and the business.
The cloud has emerged as the platform of choice for organizations that want to turn their data into cost-effective business insights that can be acted upon in the short term to deliver measurable improvements. Next-generation cloud-based platforms are the superior choice, as they are faster to implement and easier to change, allow for collaboration anywhere and anytime, cost less because no hardware is required and are always up to date.
Retailers are recognizing the value of unified digital platforms that combine channel management, marketing, procurement and financials as an ideal end-to-end retail solution. Innovative data management resources are becoming essential for understanding customer behavior and responding with compelling and satisfying shopping experiences. By acting on these data insights and evolving their business practices, retailers can keep pace with rapid change and optimize their operations in new ways.
In challenging economic and competitive environments, early recognition and implementation of beneficial digital technology puts businesses in the ideal position to outperform and outmaneuver the competition, and to produce better business outcomes overall.
As Global Product Manager for Retail Solutions at DXC Technology, Deesean Wilson is responsible for the overall product vision and strategy for retail offerings developed by DXC Eclipse, a practice within DXC Technology. With more than two decades of experience in software development and consulting, Wilson is an expert in omnichannel retail system integration, particularly in the area of store systems and point-of-sale technology. He has managed complex projects for retailers in various verticals, integrating solutions that connect business functional requirements and technical architecture needs. Wilson is committed to developing solutions that enhance customer engagement and innovation to drive revenue opportunities for retail clients across the globe.