After The Sale (Consumer Intelligence)
Consumer Intelligence – Identifying consumer buying criterion, purchase patterns and affinity measures are pre-requisites to effective marketing, merchandising, pricing and revenue growth. Augmenting consumer data housed in a CRM system with personal preferences, lifestyle information and social profiles can empower targeted communications and impressive precision marketing campaigns. And understanding seasonal trends, cross-category preferences, halo effects and up-sell opportunities are but a few data points that can trigger simple actions which lead to significant revenue growth.Few retailers optimize store structure based on hard data. To outperform peers, business intelligence should also be applied to create an optimal shopping destination, and consider how variables such as store design, store layout, store aesthetics, merchandise positioning, shelf placement, planograms, traditional and digital signage, and props and displays impact consumer behaviors, the customer experience and store sales. This data can also aid merchandising applications in order to improve decisions around inventory allocation and replenishment, cluster-based assortment planning and even workforce management.More often than not, consumer intelligence will be challenged by disparate and often siloed systems, but this challenge can be met with an enterprise data warehouse strategy.
A common theme among these best practice recommendations is adopting processes which contribute to the customers’ perception of the retailer, or in other words the customer experience. While each of these recommendations offer practical solutions to enhance the CX and the retailers business objectives, it’s critical that they be orchestrated pursuant to a continuous customer journey, as opposed to random or piecemeal actions. A holistic strategy is needed to consistently serve customers across channels and achieve slated business objectives.Link – CRM
