Today’s retail marketplace demands that retailers focus all of their attention on one thing if they want to excel and grow their business.
Yet, far too often retailers focus on building their business around their various channels as opposed to building their business around the thing that actually matters the most – their customers.
A recent study found that 100% of retailers believe that having a consistent customer experience across channels is important with more than half, 54%, saying that the biggest thing blocking them from achieving a seamless customer experience is that they don’t have a unified view of their customers. These two statistics bring up three incredibly important points.
- First, knowing who your customers are is the first essential step when defining your customer strategy, setting business goals, optimizing your marketing activities and shaping your omni-channel retail strategies. And without a firm foundation in these areas, it becomes nearly impossible to ensure that all other activities drive a positive return.
- Second, omni-channel retailing is the now and the future, so no matter how your customers choose to interact with your brand, their experience should be seamless and convenient – day or night. Because your customers view you as a single brand, they not only expect, but also demand a seamless and consistent customer experience – from initial discovery to product purchase – regardless of the channel. To put that plainly, consistency means integrated channels.
- And third, today’s siloed business structure results in duplicative customer databases and prevents the creation of an accurate and unified view of your customers. Every channel and every touchpoint produces data that can be leveraged to understand customer behavior and improve customer experiences.
So, in order to deliver a consistent, on-brand, omni-channel experience, retailers must focus on eliminating the silos within their organization and properly integrating transaction data with customer data to create a complete 360°view of their customers.
That view of your customer will facilitate your understanding of who your customers are, what their needs and expectations are, and the things that actually trigger them to buy. To optimize all lines of business and create customer experiences that meet real marketplace needs you must understand the individual customer, not just the “average” customer.
The Bottom Line
Customer data and insight are essential when shaping retail strategies, setting business goals, optimizing marketing activity, refining e-commerce strategies and implementing solutions that are aligned with company objectives and customer behavior.
Without the proper insight, it becomes nearly impossible to meet customer expectations or optimize your various retail channels, and the consequences of that can be devastating.
However, with the proper analytic solution, it’s possible to achieve the type of understanding necessary to reveal the specific values, needs and expectations of your customers.
This, in turn, will allow you to focus your resources on the channels and technology that will deliver the greatest ROI.
If you need help creating a unified view of your customers, then we should talk.
