Despite being the first session at 8:30 am on a Sunday morning, the importance of customer centricity in retail was evident in today’s merchandising-focused session by a panel of excellent speakers. The standing room only session included Insights from a research by Leslie Hand from Global Retail Insights and also case studies presented by Daniel Moe from Best Buy and Denise Darragh from Rexall.
Customer centricity is a lot more than just analyzing the data but it also involves training and execution to ensure that the insights gathered from the analytics are implemented in a manner that makes the organization more effective.
Leslie Hand’s research showed that customer centricity has indeed become top priority in retail organizations and lack of executive sponsorship is not evident in any of the high performers. The high performers are also synthesizing more data inputs and executing on actionable information sooner. The ability to use workflows and business processes effectively can benefit the retailers in executing on the plans developed from analytics in a timely manner. The high performers are also benefitting from supplier collaboration.
Denise Darragh talked about the power of loyalty programs and how it has benefitted Rexall. Loyalty programs have enabled Rexall to implement Profiled Value Segmentation and how they target the needs of specific persona.
Daniel Moe, from Best Buy, talked about how Best Buy is taking customer centricity to new levels. Best Buy treats category management in a whole new way where they don’t talk about product categories as in appliances, consumer electronics, home appliances and so on any more but rather as domains categorized by customer needs. These categories are focused on what the customer wants to do and include areas like playing games, sharing memories and so on. This new approach has enabled Best Buy to span across groups and focus on the needs of the customer. It has also enabled Best Buy to train their store associates to have the right conversations and target the right demographics based on needs.
In my conversations with retailers, I emphasize the importance of using workflows and collaboration tools along with Business Intelligence and Analytics tools. This empowers organizations to quickly act on the intelligence using the power of workflows and collaboration using tools
Overall, an excellent session, for a time when customer centricity defines the winners.