It’s not easy to visit a retail news site in 2018 without seeing a lot of discussion about what Alibaba or Wal-Mart is doing in regards to the customer experience, and it might seem that these are simply risky decisions or gambles made by big-box retailers struggling to adapt.
The opposite is true. These investments are careful, strategic initiatives made by large retailers that are sourced almost entirely on consumer data. Millions of consumer interactions, advanced regression analyses, and sophisticated customer profiles all contribute to this new understanding of modern retail.
While it is easy just to follow the leader and copy the efforts of the big retailers, it is more prudent to look at your own audience and retail traffic to find out what is unique to your own stores. Just like a small, single-location retailer might not want to copy your business strategies, mimicking larger companies is not a recipe for success.
Chances are, though, that as a mid-sized retailer, you may not be able to leverage a large number of assets or spend years gathering data in order to generate consumer insights. Here are a few ways that you can get into the big data game as a mid-sized retailer.
Utilize Your POS System’s Full Capabilities
It’s almost certain that if your business has upgraded its standard POS system in the past few years, it has out-of-the-box reporting and real-time data collection features. In fact, it may be already collecting such data, and needs to be analyzed and applied at this point.
Your POS system can tell you incredibly important things about individual customers, and build structured profiles based on what certain types of customers buy, when they buy it, how frequently they buy from you, and what types of customers respond to what changes. All of this can help you A/B test marketing campaigns and additions to your overall IT network.
Recognize Patterns in Customer Behavior With Beacons
Beacon technology in retail is underrated and not used as often as it should be. When integrated with a branded app, you can collect valuable insights into what customers are doing in various locations throughout your store.
This means collecting real-time information and being able to apply it in real-time as well. We’ve mentioned how important beacons are to building a customer experience, but it is also useful for building stronger customer profiles and understanding how your store visitors interact with your touchpoints.
Your Network and the Internet-of-Things
Are you familiar with how important the advent of the IoT is with your IT framework? Your network infrastructure has the potential to interact with literally thousands of customer devices on a monthly basis, and as a result, you should be capitalizing on the insights you can gain from those interactions.
The interactions you should be focusing on include which customers are most likely to connect with your network, what customers are using your network the most, and ultimately what touchpoints are converting the best.
If you want to learn how you can strengthen your network to accept and leverage the IoT, we want you to contact us. Worldlink Integration Group specializes in implementing the latest in technology into your brick-and-mortar locations, and we have both deployed new touchpoints and upgraded old ones for many satisfied customers. We can upgrade your current network to utilize customer data better and help get your stores on the same level as larger retailers.
Our capabilities also include expanding your current locations’ bandwidth, so your networks can support a range of new IoT devices and not experience slowdown due to heavy demand, especially during the busy holiday season.