Using customer data to build customer behavior metrics, marketing strategies and predictive analysis in an evolving retail market.
Consumer behavior and preferences have changed dramatically over the past decade, mirroring the rise of Amazon’s dominance in e-commerce. Dubbed the Amazon effect, the company’s success served as a reality check for many traditional retailers, from bookstores to grocery to apparel. Think of Borders, Circuit City, Blockbuster and Payless Shoe Stores. Their rapid demises can easily be traced back to the rise in Amazon’s popularity and the level of customer experience and service customers grew to expect. These legacy firms were unable to match the benefits Amazon offers: free shipping, seamless online checkout, fast customer service, personalization and defragmentation between the digital and physical experiences.
While this shift toward the preferences of the customer base has been ongoing for decades, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced apparel and other retail companies to rely more heavily on their digital platforms and experience. This accelerates the need for companies to rapidly improve customer listening and experience or be left behind as their base moves on. Now more than ever, these companies must learn all they can about their customers to survive. The good news is that they often already possess much of the data they need.
The data is there
For years companies have known they must use data to find out all they can about their customers and what they want. This desire has often led them to purchase and install numerous services and technologies, often haphazardly, in an attempt to gain that perfect level of understanding. Instead, they have often been left with their data assets siloed in noncommunicative platforms, unable to produce the needed insights to respond to and proactively exceed customer expectations.
These retailers need a modernized data infrastructure that helps them harness all of the data they already have in their ecosystem and put it to good use. Unraveling the web of short-sighted fixes to arrive at a holistic view of their data is the key to exposing customer habits, desires and expectations. This enables data-driven decisions that result in higher brand loyalty, a differentiated customer experience and, ideally, new revenue streams.
Figuring out how to harness that data can seem overwhelming, but Blueprint is here to help organizations set a strategy and implement the appropriate infrastructure to properly center the customer in all things, achieve their goals and realize value quickly, no matter where they are in their digital journey.
Roadmap to success
The foundation of any successful business is a solid, effective and measurable strategy. Combining guidance, expertise and diversity of thought with an intimate knowledge of a company’s key business goals, Blueprint can provide a course of action assessment on a company’s current state and a roadmap to achieve a desired future state. Blueprint maps the existing and proposed infrastructures, interviews employees and identifies pain points within the current data infrastructure and processes.
By incorporating a project definition workshop (PDW) after the assessment, Blueprint can then walk an organization through a personalized curriculum designed to comprehensively plan for the development and execution of the desired future state. The workshops bring all relevant stakeholders to the table to develop and commit to a plan before beginning any project. The result is a fully optimized project plan that addresses the right business problems and achieves the buy-in necessary for success.
Superior execution
Once an assessment and roadmap have been developed, the last thing a retailer or apparel company should have to do is struggle with cumbersome, time-consuming rollouts and technology integrations that fail to meet and respond to ever-evolving customer expectations.
Whether an apparel company wants to modernize its mobile app to facilitate a seamless customer experience between the digital and physical worlds, or they want to create unique customer profiles that can inform marketing and product offerings, the key to success is integrated data that drive actionable insights.
Blueprint recently worked with a national entertainment and restaurant chain that needed to learn more about its customers to drive interest and revenue growth. They had raw data in various disparate systems but couldn’t aggregate, analyze and unlock its true value. Following a project definition workshop, Blueprint outlined a 90-day roadmap and created a centralized data architecture allowing the company to tap into terabytes of data that had been underutilized for years.
With all their data in a single, manageable and stable location, the company can now consider business decisions with a complete picture of their customers. The company now uses this data to build customer behavior metrics and profiles for marketing, predictive analysis and layout planning.
Establishing a modern data infrastructure that brings together all a company’s data opens the door to a truly customer-centric strategy. Blueprint is the perfect partner to establish this infrastructure because we work with companies no matter where they are in their customer data journey. We achieve results and value for clients quickly. Whether your organization is unsure where to begin and needs strategic help or is ready for the technical experts to execute your plan, let’s talk about how to put your customer data to work.
