From data to value: creating meaningful customer engagements
Martina Klenkhart
Go-to-Market Lead for Retail and Consumer Goods Industries, Microsoft Western Europe
It is hard to predict future trends, opportunities, or challenges. Keeping up with the increasing pace of change is both difficult and crucial for sustainable business. Whatever happens in the future, technology will be a key enabler of resilience and successful transformation.
This is particularly true in the retail sector, where being one step ahead of what customers want to buy can mean the difference between thriving, simply surviving, or becoming obsolete. Advanced analytics doesn’t only look at the past but is also predictive and even prescriptive by providing recommended actions. And AI allows you to take a wider range of variables into account and derive recommendations specifically for your sales channels, stores, and customers.
To seize the opportunities provided by technology, data needs to be at the heart of everything. It empowers you to be agile, based on data-driven insights and predictions. With customer spending under pressure from rising costs, technology can help moving quickly from initial assessment to relevant action. One example is the development of next-gen pricing.
SAS enables its retail customers to optimize prices for regular items, promotions, and markdowns. SAS for Pricing Strategies and Optimization helps to meet financial targets and manage stock levels using pre-generated, optimized pricing strategies.
AI enables retailers to deliver personalized experiences to their customers. Personalization drives conversion rates and basket size and is often correlated with high net promoter scores. To achieve the full potential of customer insights you need to capture, connect, and analyze a variety of customer signals across channels. Here are several examples.
Data is at the heart of the shift to digital retailing for SPAR, which has been working with Adobe to increase its share of regional shopping preferences. As a result, it has experienced a 50% increase in customers. Meanwhile, Boots is personalizing digital experiences for 50 million customers with the Adobe Experience Platform.
Optimizely has helped New Era, famous for its baseball-style caps, achieve 60% year-on-year revenue growth by improving its digital customer experience. The fashion retailer has recorded 51% more product views and 70% more add-to-cart instances using the Optimizely Customer-Centric Digital Experience.
Another retail brand committed to delivering memorable digital experiences and customized product offers is L’Oréal. The make-up, haircare, and cosmetics group teamed up with Sitecore. The Sitecore Experience Platform boosts customer engagement and creates a unified, consistent digital presence across all its brands.
