How engaged are your customers?

As businesses in the retail industry steer toward a customer-centric model, customer engagement has been a buzzword. Social media created a fundamental shift in the way retailers engage with their customers and new solutions were created to gain better customer insights. According to Bain & Company, it costs between 6 – 7 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain existing customers. In addition, repeat customers tend to spend as much as 67% more.
However, the shrinking attention span of modern day consumers is a challenge. Retailers and marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to capture and hold customers’ attention. In fact, in 2000, the average attention span of a customer was 12 seconds. Now, it is 8 seconds; and that is lower than the attention span of a goldfish at 9 seconds.
Below we list 3 ways for retailers to effectively engage with the modern day customer.

Big data for retailers

Brands are collecting volumes of data generated by a variety of sources at extreme volume, velocity, variety and veracity. This entire collection of digital data is big data. Big data can be generated from CRMs, social media activities, sensors, web search, video analytics and more. With the current rate of data generation, there is seemingly endless amount of data to be collected. Leading retailers adopt advanced technologies to generate insights from big data to help them enhance the customer experience, increase operational efficiency, understand buying patterns as well as shifting customer trends.

3 retail solutions to employ in 2015

A successful retail operation is all about people: employees, customers, and the interactions between them. For seamless and efficient interactions to occur, countless solutions have been devised. New technology solutions are converging and transforming the way we shop and purchase. The list of retail solutions listed below might not all be new. However, there remain retailers who are very conservative towards the adoption of new technologies. As 2015 draws closer, retailers need to be receptive towards technology and view it as a tool to aid them in achieving customer profiles, changing buying habits, innovation, operational efficiency and customer service.