Amid a retail landscape that is being transformed by technology as well as a shift in consumer behavior, retailers and brands need to reposition their businesses by putting the consumer smack in the middle of the business model.
That’s the conclusion from a recent survey and analysis of 150 respondents who serve in various executive capacities in the retail, fashion apparel and beauty industries developed by strategic consulting firm The O Alliance created in partnership with Revmetri.
The report, titled: “Retail Transformation Under Way: Achieving Customer-Centric Commerce,” analyzed the self-assessments of the polled executives, and then classified the respondents into three groups: Leaders, followers and bystanders. “Leaders” are described as executives who have “taken steps to better understand consumer data and invest in customer insights, technology and organizational redesign,” the firm said adding that “followers” have “big plans to move toward customer-centric business and have made some progress.” And as the name implies, “bystanders” have shown “a lack of meaningful progress or plans.”
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Andrea Weiss, founder of The O Alliance, said “customer-facing tools such as smartphones, tablets and in-store kiosks have become mission critical to the shopping experience, yet most retailers still have not integrated these tools into a cohesive system that creates circular commerce.”
“While omnichannel was about giving shoppers a single view of a brand across all touch-points, the customer-centric model is about giving the brand a single view of the shopper, understanding who she is, what she wants, and how she behaves at all times,” Weiss added.
Weiss said in the report “nearly 70 percent of retailers are still struggling to evolve from an omnichannel model to one that truly puts the customer front and center.”
The five strategies include tracking a shopper’s behavior across multiple channels. The survey revealed that 43 percent of “bystanders” are using data to “effectively segment customers and only 14 percent are leveraging data to understand and map the customer journey,” the researchers said.
“To achieve true customer centricity, retailers must connect a shopper’s activities online, in store, on social media and via mobile apps to create a universal customer profile,” the firm recommended.
Of equal importance was measuring the impact of cross-channel promotions and campaigns. While 70 percent of respondents said they were doing cross-channel campaigns, only 48 percent said they were able to measure the success of the promotion. Dovetailing on this issue was an overall lack of integrating data solutions. Thirty-seven percent of those polled said they were “not combining e-commerce and in-store transaction data in a central database, and only 9 percent currently link social media activity to their customer data files.”
The authors of the report found that respondents categorized as “leaders” are adopting “flexible, cloud-based solutions that allow them to easily access all product and customer information in one centralized place.” Other important strategies that need to be deployed in a more consumer-centric approach includes integrating workforce, executive and business functions.
Lastly, the researchers identified a need to remove barriers to implementing a consumer-centric model. Thirty-three percent of respondents cited inadequate talent as an obstacle while 29 percent noted organizational silos as a barrier. Cash restraints was also highly ranked as was “questioning the promise of technology ” and a “lack of leadership vision.”