Customer Data

The retail industry has ridden its share of economic waves over time, but no sudden downturn has unleashed quite the level of uncertainty — and urgent need for adaptation — as the current COVID-19 pandemic. The ongoing crisis has laid bare the vulnerabilities of many brands’ current data strategies and highlighted the need for a…

Between November 2019 and January 2020, shoppers across the U.S. bought a record amount of goods, about $1.1 trillion, approximately 5 percent more than in 2018 over the same period, according to Deloitte. This is good news for the fashion and beauty industry at large, however, there’s a growing problem in retail that may reach…

In today’s shopping environment, consumer habits change by the day. One day shoppers may browse social media for a particular product, and the next, they browse different websites for the same product. Consumer behavior was already shifting towards digital before the coronavirus crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic, with its stay-at-home orders, has taught even the most…

In part one of this article, I examined the challenges that the retail sector has faced since the beginning of the pandemic, and its inability to rely on traditional historic consumer data when it comes to meeting consumer needs. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, however, could be the key to providing retailers with the…

It was a ticking time bomb: in a pre-COVID, increasingly omnichannel-driven world, many areas of North America and Europe were already oversaturated with physical retail. And now that the COVID-19 pandemic has either forced or prompted consumers to shop differently — often online for the first time — the shift to e-commerce has dramatically accelerated. Without…

At the start of 2020, the biggest challenges for the retail industry were issues such as market saturation, finding new ways for old and aging brands to stay relevant, and the impact of new technologies and innovations. No one anticipated the greatest challenge of 2020 — and beyond — would be a pandemic that shut…

Data has dramatically redefined the brand experience over the last decade. In some cases, it has migrated from outside the more traditional landscape — being compounded to reveal insight into consumer behavior — to data points that now can highlight why consumers make decisions in real time as they move through the physical world. Needless to…

The majority of consumers — 80 percent to be exact — say they’re more likely to shop with a retailer that offers personalized experiences. The preference for personalization is so strong that 78 percent of customers won’t even engage with an offer that hasn’t been made relevant to them. Delivering on Personalization Pays Off Businesses that…

Disparate systems and siloed data make it nearly impossible for retailers to effectively run analytics that provide insight into the business and its customers. Modernizing legacy infrastructures and moving data to a centralized location within a cloud platform lets retailers reduce IT spend (from costly maintenance), leverage advanced technologies to transform structured data into actionable…

Recent data found that nearly 70 percent of shoppers have made multiple buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) purchases, and over half have decided where to buy a product online based on whether they can pick it up in-store. BOPIS continues to grow in popularity among consumers, and for good reason — it combines the…