Forbes: Embrace technology and stop playing “Guess Who” with your customers
Similar to the popular board game Guess Who? where players take turns to guess the identity of the character on the opponent’s card, many retailers are forced to spend countless hours narrowing down and speculating which customers they should target.
This arduous and often instinct based process, is not only time consuming, but also unreliable. Fortunately, technology has a solution to this problem.
Using artificial intelligence, retailers are now receiving detailed data about the age, gender, time and location of each customer entering their stores. Gathering and analyzing consumer demographic metrics is unlocking new ways for physical stores to increase efficiency, performance and customer experience at a crucial time.
To illustrate its value, here are three ways in which demographics data is supporting physical retailers today.
1. Deliver Personalized Experiences
Delivering a high level of personalization can be tricky. For big retail chains, with customers ranging from eight to eighty, the very idea of personalizing experiences may seem impossible. This is where digging into consumer demographic data can be useful. By recognizing the time, location and sentiments of older and younger customers entering stores, retailers can begin to tailor their operations and processes accordingly.
2. Optimize All Stores
Aside from elevating customer experience, retailers should not overlook the value of consulting consumer demographics data when evaluating store performance. Each quarter, senior teams review pages and pages of profit and loss reports. Naturally, many hours are spent unpicking what is working and what’s not. One common remedy for underperforming stores is replicating processes and practices of the highest performing chains. While this can glean results, sometimes this tactic fails to appreciate the one thing that makes every store different. Its customers.
3. Measure Consumer Behavior
As brands evolve, they often need to ensure they are still engaging with the right customers. Last month, in a bid to attract younger customers, grocery chain Lidl announced that it was planning to sell fewer meat products in its stores. An important part of this change will be measuring its success. Fingers will be crossed that this commitment to greater sustainability, encourages a higher percentage of younger consumers to switch to Lidl. In this case and in so many others, assessing success without analyzing the age of consumers entering stores, will be very hard.
Read the full article on Forbes