Retailers may think they understand their customers' shopping patterns, but gift shopping for special occasions, such as the recent festive season and the upcoming Valentine's Day, turns these patterns on their heads. Real-time analytics can give retailers a competitive advantage in at these times, says SAS.
David Cosgrave, Customer Intelligence Practice Lead: Middle East, Africa & Turkey at SAS, says global retailers are fast moving to analytics to understand the customer journey, customer experience and market trends. However, South African retailers lag when it comes to harnessing real-time data from all channels and touchpoints so that they can present customers with appropriate moments-driven offers.
"Customer journeys and expectations have changed dramatically," says Cosgrave. "Now, the customer journey includes a number of channels or touchpoints - from online, to mobile and bricks and mortar." These additional touchpoints play an important role in the buying decision, and present opportunities for valuable data gathering. A recent SAS global survey of holiday shopping trends indicated that 58% of respondents look online for gift ideas, 37% get ideas from the media, and 26% get ideas from retailers' e-mails and text messages. When shopping in bricks and mortar stores, shoppers who cannot find what they are looking for will primarily go online to the same store's Web site to find it (28%), or go to another retailer's Web site to find it (23%). In fact, online is increasingly becoming the channel of choice for consumers looking to benefit from special offers and sales, with shoppers citing convenience, time saving and better offers among their reasons for shopping online.
Cosgrave says: "If you look at the customer journey, especially over major shopping times such as the Christmas season, you'll find pricing is a big driver, and online investigation plays a growing role in the customer journey, even if the customer ends up shopping in a bricks and mortar store."
These digital touchpoints present a golden opportunity for retailers to gather detailed information about their customers' preferences, and affords an opportunity for them to try and influence buying decisions, he notes. However, it is important for retailers to be aware that shopping patterns change considerably when people are buying gifts for friends, relatives and loved ones.
"This where they need to leverage real-time big data analytics capabilities," he says. "The customer behaviour that was analysed and understood during the year doesn't apply during gift-buying seasons. You might, for example, offer a banner personalised to suit the customer segment of a young, single man whenever he logs in to the retail portal during the year, but ahead of Valentine's Day and during the festive season, he suddenly starts looking for gifts - products he would never usually buy. Traditional analytics can't process this. This is where a moments-driven approach becomes more important."
Achieving an effective omnichannel strategy that delivers on the promise of moments-driven upselling and cross-selling begins with a good understanding of the touchpoints that influence customer decision-making. Retailers need to devise strategies that deliver a consistent customer experience across all channels too, says Cosgrave. "Typically, various departments operate in isolation, but to deliver a consistent customer experience, they need to collaborate," he says.
Importantly, the retailer needs to centralise its analytics, he notes. "Many retailers have Web personalisation, 'cool' mobile apps, a call centre and a marketing department doing direct mailing and SMS campaigns, but all of these channels tend to work independently. So the result is a huge volume of messages that are not personalised or targeted. A centralised analytical function that feeds all of these channels will help make that marketing and interaction process a lot smoother, and will allow for more accurately personalised offers.
"It is equally important for retailers to be able to track responses to the offers delivered via the various channels. Currently, most do not know who has responded via each of these channels. They are struggling to understand where the successes and failures lie. They do not know why carts are abandoned or how to offer high value customers the right incentives to stay loyal and spend more."
Cosgrave says top South African retailers are now looking at ways to harness real-time analytics to better understand their customers and offer customised offers and incentives to them on the fly. "Many already have some understanding of their individual customers, but they don't have ways to refine that knowledge when behaviour changes over special occasion shopping seasons. Now, they are seeking ways to better understand customer behaviour in real-time, both to improve revenues for the retailer and to improve the shopping experience for the customer," he says.
Read more about creating a consistent customer experience from analytically-based, real-time decisions here.
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