Key takeaways
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Chapter 5
Key Takeaways
- 1
Collecting lots of data in itself is not sufficient
Data needs to be enriched through analysis and used to make targeted improvements to your product or service.
- 2
Achieving a single view of the customer is key
Ensure that qualita-tive insights – from questionnaires to social media engagements – are combined with quantitative data, such as website analytics, to improve the overall customer experience.
- 3
Personalise the offer as much as possible
Consumers do not want to be sold a generic product or service; they want it to reflect their indivi-dual choices, habits and preferences.
- 4
Treat your loyal fans as collaborators rather than customers
Invite them to be a sounding board for new products and ways of working. Social-media platforms – including closed groups – can be great forums for stress-testing ideas and gathering feedback.
- 5
Focus your social media investment on the right platforms for your brand
Foodies might gravitate towards Instagram, while Twitter could show a more light-hearted side to the brand.
- 6
Ethics and sustainability are no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ but a consumer expectation
Brands with purpose live their values and build ethics and sustainability into the entire business model.
Partner comment
In retail, we are seeing more and more brands innovating and disrupting the market, coming up with new ways to better serve their customers and increase customer loyalty.
If you are still in a pile-it-high-and-sell-it-cheap model, you’re not providing consumers with the personalised service they want, you’re not able to operate your brand efficiently and it’s no longer a long-term, sustainable business model.
To be able to manage data and customers en masse and still be able to provide a more personalised, optimised service probably wasn’t possible 10 years ago. As 9 CX Disruptors explores, those retailers that have had the vision to bring technology and consumer expectations together are the ones that will flourish in today’s competitive market. Those are the retailers that truly have a single view of their customers and understand their wants and needs.
Often born out of opportunity and a better way of doing things, but also the need to transform for long-term sustainability, innovative retailers are carefully analysing their customer data and making targeted improvements in order to provide a more tailored, more customised and more personalised service. Not only are these retailers analysing buying behaviour, but they are also engaging with customers through social-media channels and, as Estrid, one of the brands highlighted in this report, puts it, using them as collaborators, gaining their input into decisions on what to launch and product design.
Working with some of the leading retail brands, such as Innocent and Seasalt, both of which are also featured in this report, has demonstrated that it’s not just the smaller, more nimble retailers that are disrupting the market. Doing it at scale, carving out your own niche and unique proposition is sometimes more challenging when you are a larger organisation. And in the case of Innocent, a brand with strong ethics, they have been able to completely change their business model in terms of how they produce and get their consumer goods to market to further live by them. As the report states, ethics and sustainability are no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ but a consumer expectation.
Fundamentally, the brand and proposition have to be able to meet a need and excite and engage consumers to maintain their loyalty, but all of that is underpinned by the data and technical capabilities that are available. It’s going to be exciting to see the next tranche of innovative brands and how they redefine the overall customer experience.
