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The key to delivering great shopping experiences? It's in the data

Dave Mariani, chief strategy officer and co-founder, AtScale, asks this question: who is going to step up in this data-driven world to create data-driven processes and better experiences for consumers? The answer, he writes, is anyone who wants to create memorable experiences for their customers, while improving bottom lines.

Photo by istock.com

October 25, 2019

By Dave Mariani, chief strategy officer and co-founder, AtScale

It's no secret that consumers prefer to shop online in today's digitally driven world. Retailers have made it seamless for consumers to browse for items, purchase with a couple clicks of a mouse and have them arrive within a couple of days — much easier than wasting gas driving to a physical store or trying to find parking at a busy shopping center.

At the same time, the e-commerce market obviously comes with increased competition that is foreign to brick-and-mortar. Thirty years ago, if you needed to go get a new pair of golf shoes, for example, you'd head to a sporting goods store to check out what they had to offer, likely purchasing a pair rather than driving to another town's shop to compare the options. Nowadays, consumers can open up tabs in their browser and compare prices and inventories on several different sites. Instead of being a few miles away, the next store is always just a click away for savvy consumers.

For this reason, retailers invest heavily in the online shopping experience and all that comes with it, making their sites easy to use, fairly priced compared to the competition and offering things like free shipping and returns, thoughtful product recommendations and more.

To stay one step ahead of the competition, brands are tapping into the power of data across their ecosystems to predict consumer shopping behaviors and make smarter, more accurate decisions across the different components of their business. The problem is, many retailers are held back by their IT infrastructures, with key data scattered across fragmented systems, so it's not all accessible to drive true value to the business or the experience of consumers.

To solve this, cutting-edge retailers are embracing technology that allows them to see all of their data, no matter where it is stored, in a single location — enabling them to apply analytics and business intelligence initiatives to optimize the customer experience, customer service and business processes in general. By doing so, retailers are able to create unique competitive advantages in a variety of areas.

Inventory

A recent industry report states that 70% of shoppers would purchase an item from a competitor if it wasn't available at the site they were originally browsing on, making it pivotal for retailers to have up-to-date inventory data across their entire ecosystems to prevent customers from shopping elsewhere.

Part of this comes from anticipating increased demand, as well as simply having the visibility into all inventory data in real-time. To have access to this vital information, having a single view of all up-to-date company data is a must.

When you consider how retail giants like Amazon use data to drive sales and predict purchase habits, coupled with the fact that 42 percent of retailers rely on previous year's shopping data to make inventory and stocking decisions, it becomes clear that the only way to be competitive in today's retail landscape is to know and be able to adjust inventory on the fly. Thus, having access to real-time inventory data is a step towards that goal.

Pricing

To stay competitive and set price points consumers find fair, a retailer simply must have instant access to accurate competitive intelligence. With nearly one-third of consumers using price comparison websites to find the best deals on certain products, and people increasingly jumping from site to site to strike the best deals, retailers must ensure their prices meet or exceed market standards. If not, the consumer will not feel like their experience is a pleasant one.

By tapping into all data on the backend, retailers have a single intelligence hub that gathers market data and competitor data at rapid speeds, helping decision makers spot market trends faster, pinpoint in-demand categories for promotions and ultimately drive better outcomes for both the consumer and the brand's bottom line — a true win-win scenario.

Supply chain

Remember the early days where packages would take weeks to get delivered? They are long gone. Nowadays, consumers expect deliveries to get to them in a timely manner. Some companies are even offering same day delivery on products, and consumers have grown tired of delivery hold-ups and out-of-stock inventory. They'll simply take their business elsewhere if these hold-ups happen.

With supply chain data all in one place, brands gain end-to-end visibility into all data points, providing accurate reports with business intelligence tools to react quickly to unexpected delays, disruptions or kinks in the supply chain. The end result? A smooth end-to-end customer experience – from purchase to doorstep and beyond.

Data runs the world

It doesn't take a visionary to realize that the online customer experience is pivotal to the success of any e-commerce company. While the early stages of online retail focused primarily on building great websites with incredible interfaces, the next five to 10 years of retail success will be determined by how brands leverage the data they have stored to improve customer interactions with their brands.

Amazon, Walmart and other retailer giants have already set the bar high with how intelligently they leverage data to improve their businesses and meet and exceed customer expectations. So, who else is going to step up in this data-driven world to create data-driven processes and better experiences for consumers? We'll wait and see, but the correct answer should be anyone who wants to create memorable experiences for their customers, while improving their bottom lines.