At first, the ever-growing pool of customer data at a retailer’s fingertips presents a chaotic picture with few tangible waypoints, but with the right technologies, know-how and talent in place, the path becomes far clearer. In many respects, the most challenging task facing companies at the start of their customer analytics adventure is not so much navigating the complex labyrinth of data and digital technology, but knowing where to begin. To help companies on their way, here are six imperatives that are central to building a sustainable customer analytics capability:
- Build
First of all, it is important to build a thorough business case to define the value of achieving customer analytics outcomes for the organization. This includes (a) defining clear objectives to ascertain the value of data assets, (b) developing a pragmatic, actionable strategy for developing sustainable customer analytics capabilities and, (c) outlining an acceptable return on investment for building customer analytics capabilities across the organization.
- Define
Once the customer analytics business case has been established, it is essential to define a clear customer analytics service offering, such as customer intelligence, customer acquisition, customer upsell/cross-sell and customer churn optimization. This is an important step in delivering high-impact, actionable insights to be used for go-to-market and customer reach.
- Develop
Onboarding the right talent is essential to achieving rollout of customer analytics strategy. Developing the right capabilities can be the difference between exceeding expectations and simply making up the numbers in the digital marketplace. As such, competition is intense to secure the best talent. A cohesive team populated with data architects, data scientists, business analysts and retail industry experts should provide end-to-end expertise and support an actionable strategy.
- Invest
In order to collect the data and put it to best use, it is vital to invest in agile, scalable systems. To this end, businesses should look to develop an integrated and fit-for-purpose technology ecosystem. This ecosystem should cover the full customer analytics value chain from data collection, analysis and visualization, to customer reach/go-to-market. While best of breed solutions might not be required for a particular retailer; designing the most fit-for-purpose architecture for retailers is essential to successful delivery of objectives.
- Establish
When implementing a customer analytics capability, retailers must establish an optimal operating model to account for new governance mechanisms, which should be instilled to leverage economies of scale. It is also important to establish suitable organizational structures to ensure efficient flows of responsibilities, and to develop processes that regulate interactions between the different stakeholders.
- Change
Technology aside, perhaps the biggest impediment to making the most of customer analytics lies in developing a truly data-driven culture within the organization. To capitalize on the power of customer analytics, organizations need to change their corporate culture. This means placing innovation, analytics and customer-centricity at its core. Here, a top-down approach is essential to ensure buy-in and fully realize the potential of customer analytics.
