Revolutionizing the retail industry with style

Are you creating communities for customers to engage with your business beyond the transactional level? Are you creating a culture for your frontline workers that enables a best-in-class customer service experience? From loyalty programs and brand strategy to maximizing the value of the information and data you have about your customers and in the supply chain, you need new products, new services, and new experiences that help differentiate your business from others in the industry. 

It’s not uncommon for retail organizations to operate in siloed operational structures, creating misaligned priorities between marketing, store operations, supply chain, finance, and technology leaders. But, when these goals are in alignment, leaders can create a more unified omnichannel customer experience and maximize the value of the data they have or can acquire. By connecting your goals, data, and technology, you can prioritize building the right things, find high-impact automations and efficiencies, run more effective marketing campaigns, maximize lifetime customer loyalty, and cultivate stronger relationships with your customers and their needs to provide them with best-in-class products and experiences.

Retailers who invest in seeing the big picture on behalf of their customers will capture greater market share than those that don’t. To achieve this, you must go beyond the surface needs of your customers and how they currently interact with your products today. You must understand their dreams, their goals, their problems, and what’s stopping them. Once you have a full picture of all the problems your customers face, you can develop the right solutions and provide them with holistic value beyond the transaction. You must develop ways for customers to stoke their curiosity and make their needs known, which will surface new adjacencies, new revenue opportunities, and new M&A opportunities and increase their desire to return when those needs are holistically met.

The sheer volume and complexity of your retail data can make it challenging to extract any meaningful insights. The data can be unstructured, incomplete or inaccurate, coming from multiple sources, and in different formats, making it difficult to integrate and analyze. The complexity from data privacy concerns and regulations can limit the use and sharing of customer data, further complicating the analysis process. You need quality assurance processes to ensure that your data is reliable and trustworthy. You need real-time data analysis to quickly respond to changing market trends and customer demands in order to make data-driven decisions to optimize your pricing, inventory, and marketing strategies. You need effective data management.

Determining which initiatives to focus on to maximize profitability and customer satisfaction when you have limited resources can be dizzying, especially in an industry where consumer preferences, market trends, the supply chain, and technology advancements can quickly shift. Effective prioritization requires a deep understanding of your customers’ needs and preferences, as well as a clear focus on your business goals and objectives. By starting with an experimentalist mindset, you must identify the quantifiable business value of each idea, maintaining an experimentalist mindset, and then using data analytics, customer feedback, market research, and expert judgment, you can make informed prioritization decisions that will drive revenue growth, enhance customer satisfaction, and improve overall business performance.

Your in-store associates and sales teams are the face of your brand—they are the frontline experience the customer has with your brand. But how well can they actually help your customers? Are they equipped with adequate training and access to learning programs that enable them to advise and consult with your customers? Do they have the right technology to support themselves and the customer at the moment of action? Wrapping your technology strategy around leadership alignment, organizational design, operational process improvement, supply chain transparency, and best-in-class change enablement can help ensure adoption and belief in the experiences being created across your frontline teams.