Previously, we established that finding a competitive advantage in the retail industry means gathering data and insights into current supply and demand trends. Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) and retail companies across the nation are tapping into effective market trends, such as customer engagements, to understand the changing behaviours of consumers, utilising those insights, and making retailing more customer-centric.

Firstly, your organisation should know how well you understand your customers. Do you understand why and how they are shopping with you? Can you predict which products will sell through which existing channels, brands or customers? For the past 20 years, analytics has been important to retailers. However, the granularity and immediacy of customer data needed and the ability to act on data has changed. Today, customer and store or product data influences everything.

“Imagine how much more profitable your business would be if you could access 100 times more data about your consumers.”

Then, we study the importance of understanding and acting on customer’s changing behaviours. How well can your organisation anticipate your customers’ needs when they are in and around the store with a mobile app, shopping online or communicating with customer service? With consumers ever more reliant on technology, they are leaving behind digital breadcrumbs and displaying their “digital body language”. Combined with how consumers interact with retailers across all channels, loyalty programs, promotions, and customer service, this mass of consumer data offers retailers their best chance yet to really know their customers.

“Think about how you are making information from websites, social media and mobile apps available in a usable format for your business to extract value.”

Next, it is important that we identify what our consumers’ wallet share looks like, where it is won and where it is lost. Here, your organisation should know your biggest spenders, what categories they spend on the most, as well as which products, services and offers you make are more appealing. While much of customer analytics to date has been focused on better targeting marketing messages to specific segments, the real opportunity lies in using customer analytics to find underserved groups of customers with the likelihood to spend more.

“If your organization could easily integrate and analyse data which exists in POS systems, online transactions, loyalty programs, mobile apps, and social media, it could make the decisions that would increase wallet share.”

Lastly, FMCG and retail organisations, such as yours, could benefit from increasing the speed and granularity of analysis to proactively utilise customer insights. Is the analysis done in your organisation performed on historical data and evaluated from hindsight? How detailed is customer analysis and how long does it take for actionable decisions? According to a recent Intel study, 63% of analytics will be real-time, as opposed to batch, by 2015.

“Think about how your organisation is enabling business users to access and leverage real-time (or near real-time) data in a timely manner.”

Accelteam has been actively working with customers from the various technology industries driving business improvements through advanced data-processing technology. With the aim to promote full use of mass and complex data sets, Accelteam has the solutions to help companies use data to generate better and smarter business decisions.

In fact, for the past two decades, AccelTeam has been one of the leaders in providing advanced data-processing technology throughout the region. If you would like to learn more about Tableau, please reach out to us at info@accelteam.com.