Here’s How You Can Build A Great Data-Culture!

Numbers play a vital role in any business. From the number of stores, the number of customers, profits made, etc are all measures that show you how well your business is doing. In the early days, data was pretty much about money invested, inventory and profit made. With the growth of technology in all the Business operations, retailers are now collecting, collating and using data to understand their customers better. Building a data-culture, hence, becomes extremely important and this article will help you do so.

Consumers, today, leave a trail of information through numerous interactions. Interactions they have with businesses explicitly or implicitly-be through transactions that are captured via the POS systems, the feedback and sentiments they share through social media, their emotions and interactions with the sales representatives and/or during a store visit and more such information pertaining to their association, tastes, likes, dislikes, etc.

Customer experience is all about perception:

Customers continuously observe and compare your brand against others and create opinions or perceptions basis that. It is what the customer’s see, hear, and feel when they interact with the brand and that happens every time the customer visits your website, pays a bill, calls customer support, visits your store, uses your products, etc. Every touchpoint across the customer journey helps to shape it. Hence, understanding your customer at every occasion is of prime importance for a retailer to keep him engaged and ensure that there are no bad experiences during his interactions at any touchpoints with the brand. All these interactions that the customer makes with the brand is a goldmine of data not only to understand what the customers want but also to improve their operations across functions.

From bits to barrels, data is the new oil!

While each bit of information needs a type of data that is most relevant to its corresponding activities, the organization’s data is stitched together and organized in an integrated manner that allows everyone to have a holistic view to multiply the influence of this data in day-to-day activities.

In the digital world today, connected devices and connected individuals generate a humungous amount of data. This data has to be converted by organizations into information and insights to unlock its true value. This is precisely what the data knowledge continuum theory states.

However, the path to generating value from data requires a methodical approach that involves understanding the business objective, setting up the foundation and good practices in capturing the right pieces of information, augmenting with external data where needed, organizing and harnessing this data for capturing rich insights, and putting it through rigorous testing and use cases for realizing its full potential.

There is a vast amount of data out there. So, the first thing is to not get overwhelmed by it. The key is to focus on the business problem at hand and what information could help solve it.

But building a data-culture is not all that easy!

There three roadblocks when it comes to data:

• Availability,
• Mapping,
• And understanding the utility of this data.

If you are able to collect the right data, connect all the dots in the right method and have the right talent to understand and utilize this, then you are moving towards a data-driven decision making culture and really unlock the true value that the data provides.

Each customer is different. They have different preferences when it comes to communication and their buying habits. And more importantly, they want to be treated as an individual. 80% of the profits come from 20% of the customers. Hence, it is very important to know your customer buying patterns, behaviour and preferences. Also, it is important to know why your customer is leaving and use those insights to resolve customer issues faster.

Each organization today has a unique system through which they collect data and a defined methodology through which they utilise this data to help them serve their customers better. People have evolved over time with increased awareness about machine learning capabilities but data privacy is one field where organizations still need to pull up their socks.

Organizations today, are more susceptible to data breach and therefore it is essential that the right legislation and policies be put into place to reduce privacy gaps and can be controlled centrally.

Should I capture anything and everything? Nope.

While every metric is important when it comes to business and customer, there are some more important than the others. Customer NPS, Revenue per Customer segments or Customer Life Time Value, Number of Customers (new customers acquired plus the number of active customers), sales figures, store profitability, inventory, and measurement (marketing effectiveness) are the most important metrics that help a business grow.

Customer satisfaction and customer experience are the most important metrics for any retail organization. The effort and cost that a retailer incurs to attract a new customer are far greater than what it takes to keep the customer loyal and engaged with the brand at all times.

Data helps businesses to understand their customers better and provide them with superlative experience. However, organizations that fail to capture this information will be unable to draw meaningful insights that are paramount to understand the consumer better and thus will be unable to provide discerning and competitive products, services, and experiences that are curated and personalized to the consumer needs and life stages. A data, well captured timely, accurately, and comprehensively is fundamental to mining it effectively, which in turn can propel superior customer experience.

Want to capture customer data and marry it with customer satisfaction/customer NPS? Request a demo today!