Using Analytics To Surprise And Delight Your Customers: Five Places You Can Optimize Interactions, Guest Series Part 2

Gary Falter, senior manager of strategy and analytics client services, Pitney Bowes Software

As retail executives strategize about the future of business, big data and customer analytics loom large. While the prospect of crunching data to better understand your customers is tantalizing, it can also be a bit intimidating. After all, big data is not helpful to us if we don’t know how to manipulate it to help us improve the way we relate to and engage with our customers.

The good news is that we already have the technology to use big data in creative ways that will surprise and delight our customers. Companies that are willing to get their feet wet and adopt new technology will be ahead of the curve. Analyzing big data can bring us closer to gaining a 360 degree view of our customer’s needs and wants. In this tough economic climate, using big data to create a personalized customer experience may be the difference between sinking or swimming.

We now have more knowledge about our customers’ preferences than ever before. We also know where our customers like to interact with our brand, whether it is through email, social media, phone calls, direct mail or walking into our stores. As retailers, the key to success is integrating what we know about our customers’ likes and dislikes into every interaction we have with them. It means taking what we learn about a customer online and introducing it into our in-store engagement with them, and vice versa.

You can catch up with Part 1 of this series here.