The success of Retail Retailing is in the real tail

The 21st century Retailing has moved beyond Brick & Mortar to omnichannel mode since the internet, digital infrastructure, and mobile phones propelled at the hands of consumers. The Digital Era allowed Retailers to closely tail (follow) their customer’s digital movements and thus understand their choices and preferences. As a second step, Customers got inducement offers to convert their preferences to buying choice, either online or at a shop, thereby converting an aspiration into real commerce. Some consumers, in this journey of induced buying, made wise choices of fulfilling their dreams, while others made an impulsive choice of buying, only to repent later

The art of tailing a customer closely emerged as a 21st-century practice amid digital traceability, privacy, personal data concerns, and security. However, since data is the new oil, every data of real or potential customers was crunched, and several dots connected to understand the customer’s mind and thinking. The creation of personalized choices of offers or promotions was easy then and targeted against a specific customer of choice, inducing them to make the buying choice.

While data collection and privacy are the hot debate on the questionable side, customization, or personalization is the welcome development from the customer experience angle. Personalization made customer jobs easy in most cases, saving good amount of time for the customer. Predictable models of “what next” for a customer’s desires got developed and probably, made customer decision-making easier of curated choices presented. While customer derived value out of personalization, Retailers derived benefit of knowing customer behaviour and predicting their next behaviour or sometimes influencing their future behaviour to their advantage.

Retailing is the business of fulfilling customer demand for goods through multiple channels of customer convenience and often giving the customer similar or same experience across those channels. However, modern retail places more reliance on digital, and thus data becomes the backbone of every decision-making. Modern Retail ERP software is omnichannel ready and can present a 360-degree view of customer data combining customer actions across the various channel, including customer non-actions

Retail ViVA, our retail ERP, comes with embedded e-commerce and m-commerce modules along with digital marketing tool that can tail digital customer behaviour in Retailer’s eco-system and creates a personalized offer or promotion targeted at that customer without any privacy intrusion automatically. This personalization is the key to the conversion of a customer’s desire to demand to successful sale.

Tailing (following) consumers give us data, and data give us options. Options give us thoughts for customized content and content connects with customers. Customers make a choice, and more data gets generated. Thus, the cycle goes on to target customers again and again with personalization

We have slowly moved to a Customer Experience economy, and thus personalized offers become most critical to creating the best of customer experience. The more personalized a Retailer can target its customers; the more customer experience gets created and more positive buying actions get triggered by the customers. With more digital and more data, this is sure to scale to newer heights in the years to come!

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan