Imposing personal safety adherence measures such as redesigning the floor layouts, marking safe social distancing, etc. are immediate solutions, but they may end up creating discomfort in the long term. In this scenario, adopting technology can help retailers tackle these challenges while reducing costs and improving efficiency.

In this article, we look at how retail analytics can play a significant role in helping businesses to overcome these challenges.

In-store analytics

In-store analytics empowers retailers with interactive, dynamic, and real-time dashboards with insights into the customer’s in-store behavior. For instance, customer interaction in a specific zone or an area in the store. In-store analytics’ unprecedented potential to track and analyze customer store behavior patterns enables retailers to adopt better in-store product placement strategies ensuring customer engagement and, in turn, a superior customer experience. These insights coupled with geographical data can also help stores to evaluate the COVID-19 exposure in the geographies where their stores exist. 

Footfall analytics

Measuring the number of visitors will enable the retail stores to analyze and compare store performance over a period of time with respect to customer visits. People analytics can be leveraged to assess employee – visitor ratio, employee performance, schedule employee shifts, predict visitor trends, and forecast optimum recruitment intervals. Various departments such as facilities management, operations, inventory management, and supply chain management, can utilize the insights generated to make faster and smarter decisions. 

Customer sentiment analysis

Capturing customer sentiment on the retail premise helps retailers gauge the efficiency of the services they offer. Customers can be asked to share their feedback using their mobile phones at the entrance or exit doors about various parameters such as safety, comfort, and confidence. They can also run sentiment analysis on data from facial analysis, social media networks, and different online forums. These can help them to improve their offerings and enhance the customer experience.

Cross-platform analytics

Customers today are more empowered and connected than ever before. Retailers must track customer intent much before they visit the store by analyzing their behavior from across touchpoints such as a desktop webpage, native & third-party applications, and mobile sites in one place. This cross-platform analytics will help retailers understand how the customer moves through various channels before they visit the store for purchase. They expect companies to provide seamless experiences across channels that reflect their history, preferences, and interests. Understanding the whole customer journey and discovering their behavioral insights allows retailers to create a consistent and unified experience through all the different channels.

In Conclusion

Retailers who want to thrive in the future must leverage the vast potential that retail analytics offers. They must make smarter and faster decisions based on meaningful insights from retail analytics to ensure increased revenue, higher profits, enhanced customer engagement, and superior customer experience.   

Black Rock IT Solutions has developed retail analytics solutions to help global retail enterprises operate more efficiently. Experion’s expertise and experience in assisting organizations to realize their strategic and operational goals has enabled us to gain an edge in the workings of the retail industry. To know more about how we help businesses ensure business continuity and enhance customer satisfaction amidst the COVID-19 crisis, drop a mail to sales@blackrockdxb.com.  

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