This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Data Fabric in Retail: The Go-To Solution to Boost Customer Experience and Personalization.
By Jack Pollard, freelance writer.
Retail is one of the most competitive landscapes out there today. Consumption is at an all-time high, but the cost of living crisis means that brands need to fight harder than ever to convince consumers that their products are what they need. This is especially true for anything that isn’t an essential. Luxury products, even if fairly priced, can get chucked out of the budget faster than you can blink.
This doesn’t mean that consumers aren’t buying luxury or frivolous products, just that they might not be buying them from you.
So, how do you win them back over? By improving the customer experience and by personalizing your approach. This has been a go-to mantra for almost a decade now, but it’s not widespread because many businesses simply can’t manage it, all because they don’t have their data organized well enough.
By investing in a data fabric, you can finally start pooling all those datasets together, organizing them properly, and putting them to work. It’s the next step in data management, and it’s just the ticket to prep your analytics, AI, and machine learning programs to finally make personalization a reality for your brand.
The Problem With Maintaining the Data Status Quo
To fully understand why you need a data fabric solution for your retail industry, you need to understand how your siloed data is holding you back. As a retailer, you have data coming in from point-of-sale (POS) systems, loyalty programs, social media platforms, e-commerce platforms, and every single customer service interaction (direct and indirect).
This is a lot of information, especially since some info (like reviews or brand mentions) aren’t automatically saved to your system and need to be sourced externally. So long as that data remains siloed, you’ll find it difficult to have a comprehensive view of your operations, and analytical and personalization tools will be limited in what they can do for you.
To sum up, maintaining your data status quo means:
- Limited understanding of customer journeys, preferences, purchase patterns, and more.
- Inability to manage an effective personalized marketing campaign
- Inefficient operations across the board.
Why Retail Enterprises Need a Data Fabric Solution
Data fabric is your single source of truth. Your system’s nervous system. It is not only the framework you use to bring all those siloed data sources into one single space, but it’s also how you organize and store it. Done right, your data will be prepped, primed, and made ready for analysis and yes, personalization.
With a fully realized data fabric by your side, there’s no limit to what your business can do with your data. This is because data fabrics, by their very nature, are scalable, allowing them to grow with your company.
Once implemented, you can expect all these benefits:
Unified Customer Profiles
By unifying all your data into one source, you can finally compile all the data you have on each customer. This means you can easily look, in an instant, at all the behavior you have tracked over their relationship with you. You can see their purchase history, browsing behavior, loyalty program activity, and even if and how often they interact with your social media. Having all that info together is essential it comes to sourcing information needed to build a personalized customer service experience.
Advanced Customer Segmentation
Of course, you do want to group some of your efforts. Just because the goal is to offer a personalized approach does not mean that you need to craft a unique marketing or user experience strategy for every single one of your customers. What you can do, however, is start by segmenting customers by demographic information like location, purchase power, loyalty status, etc. By segmenting them in this way, you can advertise more effectively, and offer a more nuanced level of personalization that takes into consideration like budget, location, and even what’s trending in that demographic.
The good news is that managing those segments is easy in a data fabric.
Enhanced Personalization Experience
Now, where you can immediately start offering a personalized user experience is in how customers interact with your website. If they have an account or have accepted cookies on your page, you can use your structured data to easily keep track of every customer’s journey. If they were looking at guides on your site but didn’t buy anything last time they visited, for example, you can put up a banner at the top of your site advertising those products to help encourage customers to make it to the next.
All you need to do this is to set your system up so customers who look at this product, or article, get shown similar content the next time they visit. The more data you save over time, the more you can refine your automated approach, and the happier you’ll make your customers.
Omnichannel Experience
If you want to offer an omnichannel experience to your customers, you’ll need a data fabric. Omnichannel experience is one of the most powerful personalization and customer satisfaction investments you can make for your company. However, getting systems to talk to each other enough when your data is siloed can be a headache.
By putting all your data in one source of truth, your data fabric, you prime your company to then move forward with the omnichannel experience. In doing so, you’ll immediately stand out in the world of retail, simply by offering a high level of personalization.
Ready to Build a Data Fabric for Your Retail Business?
There are so many powerful benefits of implementing a data fabric for your large-scale retail business, from enhanced analytics, to personalization, to even building the backbone of the omnichannel experience. To get started with your journey, you’ll need to fully invest in a data fabric strategy and implement the tools that can ferry info over, process it, and store it. You do have a long journey ahead of you, and it’s crucial you get this project right, so don’t be afraid to hire on a professional or use ready-made software to kickstart your efforts.
