If I asked a retail marketer to compile a list of retail buzzwords, I suspect that ‘big data’ would feature quite highly. But like any fashionable word, it is going out of style as the industry becomes increasingly fatigued at its very mention.
This is because big data never quite lived up to its initial excitement and promise of opportunity for the retail industry. With high expectations of a world in which real-time customer insight would power stronger relationships, businesses fully bought into the idea. But are they any closer to identifying what a customer wants when they walk through their shop door? Not really.
The issue is, companies are getting lost in the numbers game. With so much data readily available to analyse, across numerous channels and locations, marketers are drowning in a sea of information. In reality, only a small percentage of these statistics will ever be analysed – and an even smaller proportion will become insights, used to power more effective decision making.
To make big data work effectively for today’s fast-paced environment, the industry needs to work backwards. Businesses need to consider their end goal at the beginning – whether that is to gain a holistic picture of how each consumer shops, across all channels, or to customise every individual’s experiences in a relevant, rewarding way.
Whatever that goal, decision makers need to then work out what insights they need to support it. And, rather than trying to divide groups of customers into neat little segments, based on common patterns of behaviour, those insights must be personally intuitive.
To drill down into customer intelligence at an individual level, businesses need complete unity. A single view of the truth is the key to unlocking the very different requirements of today’s omnichannel shoppers.
And this cohesive customer view must extend beyond number crunching; senior decision makers need to be working towards the same goal, rather than in silos to achieve success. Reporting might not be the most invigorating part of running a business, but it is the lynchpin between what shoppers are doing, and how quickly and effectively decision makers can respond to their behaviour.
With a holistic, centralised view of what’s going on in the company, and a business-focussed objective at the forefront, big data becomes a driver for better decision making, not the end of the journey.
This empowers companies not only to make responsive decisions and uncover profit-building opportunities, but enables them to track behaviour longer-term – and make more accurate predictive decisions as a result.
The industry should strive beyond top line analytics, using data-driven insights to help businesses plot their next move ahead of the competition.
By Kevin Mundy, director at business intelligence specialist, Intasight
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