Corporate Retailers – Need to Understand This ?

Any retail chain organisation, operating multiple stores across multiple states and cities, and sometimes in multiple countries, faces real time challenges due to complexity of environment and dynamic changes .

The major problems faced by any B2C Organisation in recent times is Demand planning, Customer experience, Launching new Products successfully, Targeted Marketing, Stock Out situation during peak season.

Beyond this, the majority  of entrepreneurs are not able to make decisions in the right time due to unavailability of data and proper analysis on time. 

For SMEs, there is a dearth of right technology and skilled data scientists to create customized platforms  & solutions for the businesses.

However, we will be writing blogs for the coming months and try to provide some actionable insights which can be developed and implemented for retail businesses.

First let’s understand what are the acute problems faced by any organisation and how “Data” can help to make correct evidence based decisions.

Pain Points

• Customer Data Analytics  : 

Segmentation involves dividing up customer data –for example relating to age range, location, shopping habits, or product usage– and grouping similar data together. Segmentation also helps you assess which groups are most profitable for your business, enabling you to both identify the most valuable customer segments and avoid wasting money on segments that are unlikely to yield conversions.

Measuring Few critical metrics like Customer acquisition cost, Customer Lifetime value and Customer Churn rate to enhance the customer experience. 

• Demand Forecasting :

Not only the out-of-stock problem has an adverse effect on profits, but it also causes major customer dissatisfaction.

In fact, 30% of customers feel that products being out-of-stock (OOS) hurts their shopping experience. The best way to increase customer satisfaction and build brand loyalty is to meet their needs at the same moment of that need.

However, excess inventory at the same time affects the Net profit of the Company adversely. The inventory imbalance can be solved to most extent by using predictive demand sensing tools and building the culture for the same in the organisation. 

• Personalised Targeted Marketing : 

Creating personalized marketing and experiences has everything to do with good quality data and the way you use it.

Brands combining consumer data with advertising technology are delivering individualized messaging, products and experiences to consumers in more innovative ways than ever. 

• Scaling of New Age Loyalty Programms and Building right CRM :

Customers don’t even wake up from their bed for 1% cashback.

Delight your loyal customers by giving them access to experiences & benefits that make them feel special. and to understand your customers better, to send more relevant campaigns to maximize the value from your loyalty customer base you need to look at CRM differently.

CRM has evolved from a one size fits all blanket marketing (1st gen) to segment driven marketing (2nd gen) to now an individual customer 1 to 1 approach (next-gen).

In this blog, we presented major problems of using actionable data analytics in retail and various strategies on how to identify this. At this moment, we have sufficient background to focus on the solution of these problems, which we will cover in the upcoming blogs on each pain points.