19DECEMBER - JANUARYGRABBING CUSTOMER ATTENTION IN THE EVOLVING RETAIL SPACEto gain better insights into our customers' diverse shopping habits. The model showed that around 48 percent of customers visited the same store on the same day every week and bought the same items. The insights we gained was that for this customer group, the most important factor for brand loyalty was the availability of the items whenever they walked into the stores. Today, we leverage a similar customer segmentation model at QVC, where we always link our marketing with our customer insights. We talk extensively with our customers about their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in interactions with our offerings. From the insights gained from these talks, we give them relevant, top-notch marketing insights and good brand content. This also confers the added advantage for retailers to understand their customer base better, albeit propelled by excellent customer segmentation work aided by data analytics. A strong link between customer insights and marketing area is absolutely critical for driving business and translates into enhanced customer experience. This in turn helps retail personnel engage and connect better with the shoppers, who tend to come from vastly different backgrounds, interests, and life stages.The Retail Space of TomorrowAs for the future of retail, we are entering a very interesting space with a trend that relates to an integrated approach to shopping and leisure. Now, shopping in person is going to be about leisure, while all practical shopping will be done online. The most successful retailers of tomorrow will be those who can contribute to making shopping a leisure experience. Cue novelties like in-store theater or in-store demonstrations that are set to become commonplace eventually for brick-and-mortar stores. For instance, IKEA has set up a shop at Oxford Circus and is gradually moving into city centers to attract customers during their casual outings. The IKEA folks have stated that while people don't necessarily tend to merely walk around the store all weekend, they might just drop in to buy a few things that catch their fancy while out in town spending leisure time. This is probably the biggest trend that I see happening in retail over the next five years, possibly even sooner. Advice to Budding Retail AficionadosWith my background in data analytics, I would say there's been an explosion in the number of technologies out there. One could never become an expert in every data visualization tool and every programming language in use. So, from a technology point of view, my advice will be to learn SQL, the fundamental in data analytics, and pick a couple of tools and languages, and become experts in them. And from a retail angle, I would say ­ at the risk of sounding like a cliché ­ that retail personnel need to be as close to their customer as possible to know their likes and preferences inside out. This is important because what you think will be great may not necessarily resonate with the customers. So, you'll constantly need to test and learn their ways to find out what customer engagement strategy is relevant, what works or doesn't work, why, and for whom. Need QuoteOnline transactions were far from mainstream and having an online presence on the marketplace was an afterthought for most retailers
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