Getting closer to consumers and achieving customer-centricity within a business is the Holy Grail for retailers battling for a share of shopper spend in today’s competitive market.
Successfully getting closer to shoppers will enable retailers to listen and learn, shaping their future strategies based on what their customers are telling them. This approach must be the model retailers adopt to ensure they are still pleasing their customers in 2020 and beyond.
Rigid five-year plans are typically a thing of the past now, with future-proofing achieved by day-by-day analysis of shopper behaviour and emerging technological trends. So, how do retailers succeed in this new world?
Stay on trend
British Retail Consortium (BRC) director-general, Helen Dickinson, says in her introduction to the trade body’s Retail 2020 report series, “as our behaviour as customers’ changes, so too do retailers”.
But to ensure their business is prepared for the future and to serve a customer that does not yet exist, it’s important retailers are ahead of the game; being proactive, not reactive. They need to understand emerging trends and put flexible systems and strategies in place to move with the times, or even take risks or undertake partnerships with businesses that are shaping consumer behaviour.
A valuable way of creating strategies for 2020 and beyond is to raise awareness of your brand and engage with Generation Z. The social media generation, as they have been dubbed, are an especially important demographic to target as they’ll be the next big spenders and potential high earners.
Retailers that are driving sales and growing at present are those committing time and effort to social channel development, connecting with the younger generation on the websites where they spend so many hours a day.
Online fashion house Asos waxed lyrical in its half-year results announcement recently about how it has cemented its position “as early adopters on emerging content formats such as shoppable Instagram stories, Instagram Live, Facebook Live, Facebook Canvas and Snapchat lenses across key channels”. The retailer spoke in detail about how this has enabled the company to engage with its audience “in a way that feels fresh and evolves as quickly as the platforms themselves”.
To ensure retailers have the right strategies in place for tomorrow, this is the type of approach they need to take today.
Understand the voice of your customer
As retailers look to delve even deeper into the minds of their customers, I was intrigued by a recent blog from Gartner research director Augie Ray, whose writing hits the nail on the head in terms of how to achieve customer centricity.
Ray calls on organisations to start executive meetings with customer call recordings and for businesses to include real customer comments in proposals for improvements to customer processes. She also urges companies to periodically invite customers in to speak with groups of employees, allowing them to share their perspectives and your staff to ask questions.
“No employee can be customer-centric if they never hear from a customer, and no firm can be customer-first if they always lead with data, products, and processes,” she argues.
“Use the genuine voice of your customer to put your employees and leaders in a different frame of mind and foster a customer-first culture.”
While this process, which is known as voice of customer programming, allows retailers to understand the here and now of what their shoppers expect, it should also provide pointers for what their future demands will be. Retailers can simply allow shoppers to shape their future for them – that’s how to build strategies for the customer that doesn’t yet exist.
