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Turn data into insights, uncovering business performance drivers. Empower your team with tailored insights for effective action. Learn more.
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Going beyond the data dashboard
Retailers understand the need for high quality customer data, but data sources and the volume of data captured continue to increase exponentially — from purchase to consumption behavior, online click data, in-store analytics from RFID tags and camera analytics. With these changes compounded by first-party data guidelines and consumer attitudes to data collection, it’s critical to pull insights out of the data you do collect. New technologies are now capable of going beyond data outputs to deliver insights that can create a more 360-degree view of the consumer. That includes not just ways they engage with brands, but how they live their lives “off-brand.” What other brands do they shop? What else do they purchase? How do they use it? Can you meet a need for these other products and services too — and build business? Am I meeting my customers’ needs? The resulting data-driven insights identify existing or emerging trends and enable more strategic decision-making about customer journeys and how retailers pursue new growth opportunities across core, adjacent and emerging markets.
Evolve from KPI to CPI
The pathway to retail success today is understanding what products, services and experiences customers really expect across your channels, and delivering it consistently. As consumer experiences have become primarily digital, mobile and connected, the journey and volume of customer interactions with data collection points expands and creates opportunities for insights-based analysis. Traditional data analytics pinned to KPIs can capture a detailed picture of sales revenue, your gross profit margin and things like inventory turnover and ROI. But while that provides a good barometer of overall business performance, it doesn’t deliver the customer detail needed to personalize marketing to consumers or understand their purchase behaviors to create greater efficiencies and drive growth. That requires the adoption of CPIs — customer performance indicators. CPIs capture the data needed to pinpoint what customers are buying, why and how much it costs you to acquire and retain their business. Common CPIs include sales conversion rate, the average value of each transaction (ATV), basket size and the average time taken to fulfill an order. Retailers can also use datapoints like the customer satisfaction score and net promoter score to assess how satisfied and likely to recommend your brand or products a customer may be. This kind of intelligence, combined with an insights-based analysis approach at scale, can deliver dramatic improvements to targeting, engagement and sales.
Use insights to inform all actions and build ongoing trust
Insights shouldn’t be a one-time use. As retailers move from data to insight, and insight to value, ongoing operations, employee metrics and consumer CPIs become an essential tool that continues to inform decisions that build trust with consumers — not an easy thing to execute or maintain. In fact, the EY Future Consumer Index finds that consumer trust is exceptionally hard to acquire. As part of the survey around consumer sentiment, when asked what level of trust they currently have in various organizations, only 10% of US consumers completely trust online-only retailers and chain retailers. And only 13% completely trust CPG (consumer packaged goods) brands in general.