There has been an exponential growth in the retail industry which has made it an ideal niche for upcoming businessmen. As new businesses are opening their shops every day, creating a difference becomes very difficult. The new age customers demand more convenience and some value added services to stick to a brand. Customers are exposed to innovative retail experiences and they look for some differences in their brand. As a retail business owner you must understand that your present customers will switch over to your competitors if they do not find sustainable advantage or value in your services. This is why the retail brands should try and enhance their products and customize the offerings. As a retail business owner you have to offer the customers profitable pricing models and easy shopping experience. If you focus on the convenience of customers then you can retain and win new customers.
From the business perspective, the retail brands have to ensure that the cost to service for each customer is reduced and thus the business profit margins are protected. To maintain the margins, the retail brands need to create efficiency in sourcing, store operations and supply chains. The promotional spends should be better utilized and most should be made of the discount offers. Often the promotional spends of companies grow because they target new customers each time, now earning new customers costs 5-10 times more than keeping the existing ones. This is where the role of retail call center comes into the equation. An efficient call center outsourcing company can help you keep the existing customers loyal and leverage benefits of promotions.
Apart from the contact center services, the outsourced call centers also provide analytics services which are very useful for the retail brands. Some of the ways in which the analytics services can help the retail brands have been mentioned below.
The Basic Needs
If you are able to understand the customer’s needs and realize them in advance then you will surely attract the customer’s attention and make him/her buy your products. So, the strategies for retail brands should change from managing customer relationships to retaining and nurturing the relations with existing customers. To attract customers you need to have an in-depth understanding of the customer behavior and trends in the market. You should align these findings in line with your products. The customer service data that is collected by the call center outsourcing company presents a huge opportunity to understand customer behavior patterns and decision making insights. The insights when used to meet your goal can surely please the customers and help your brand earn profits.
How Insights Influence Retail Sales?
What is the source of insights? They come from the data collected from research and analytics wing. Research can be termed as an act of gathering and synthesizing data from primary (from the customers and opinion leaders) or secondary sources (forum discussions and other published content).Data analytics on the other hand refers to the use of quantitative method, which can be investigative or predictive, to find an explanation for the trends and find the influence of drivers for the economic condition. R&A can be a one-off process or a continual search for facts. The decisions based on R&A findings have to take into account other factors such as consumer behavior, competition, demographics and the economic condition. The data collected through the research and analytics become a sort of knowledge bank for the company. The knowledge bank can be used to check on the core disciplines such as forecasting the demand accurately, helping sales of particular products or analyzing the effect that loyalty programs are having. The pricing of products can be decided with the help of these findings.
Changing Role of Analytics
The concept named analytics has been around in the retail industry for quite some time but its role has changed significantly over the years. In the past years analytics was only limited to certain types of data mining practices. Now analytics has assumed a completely different role whereby people are connected, systems and processes are structured and a measurable framework is set to leverage information from customer interactions. With the help of analytics retail businesses are able to get best ROI from the data that is stored in their repository and convert knowledge for customer centric services.
Features of Investigative Analytics
Investigative analytics seeks to find the causes after a particular event has already occurred. In the retail business scenario it can be translated into performance of a promotional activity and loyalty program. Investigative analytics serves well in the below mentioned situations:
- Assortment analysis
- Fraud analysis
- Store location analysis
- Loyalty program analysis
- Promotion campaign analysis
- Out of stock analysis
- Industry benchmarking and competition analysis
Role of Predictive Analysis
Predictive analysis does not look back; it helps in taking informed decisions for the future. It will use the data collected in the past to understand the trends and problem areas to help businesses better their offerings in the future. Predictive analysis can help brands take important decisions by:
- Stock planning with the help of demand forecasting
- Evaluating customer conversion and churn to increase the customer lifetime
- Identifying the prospective customer base for campaigns
- Increasing the productivity of human resources
- Helping gain agility to respond to any changes in the market condition
- Increasing the efficiency of in-store customer service
As you can see the analytics services of retail call center can help businesses in more ways than one. So, when you contact a call center for outsourcing services do take their analytics services too.
