Improve customer experience with data collection and analysis

Data collected from different sources hides a lot of information that could bring huge benefits to your business. Unfortunately, many companies don’t leverage the information, which means losing a very important advantage over competitors. Using data effectively, to its full potential, increases the ability to understand customer behaviour and provides the opportunity to build the most appropriate strategies, which automatically leads to increased sales.

In business, the right use of data is the key to success when it comes to increasing profits. Through thorough analysis, you will gain actionable insights with which you can improve every aspect of your company’s strategies and actions. In retail, the thing that could make all the difference is the shopper experience, as business growth is directly dependent on customers, whether we’re talking about an online or a physical store. So if you can collect relevant data, analyse it and make decisions accordingly, you will attract new customers and achieve sales growth.

Customer satisfaction is an important indicator for any business, especially for retail companies. That’s why you need to pay more attention to market rese ustomer satisfaction is an important indicator for any business, especially for retail companies. Big data can help improve the customer experience, understand customer habits and build strategies to influence their purchasing decisions.

Here are some suggestions on how you can use data collection to your advantage:

Collect point-of-sale data
Retail companies need to start seeing point-of-sale data collection as more than just a solution for inventory management – it’s actually direct feedback from customers. Indeed, sales data is largely numerical, but its importance should not be overlooked, as this information will provide answers to even the most complicated questions in the areas of marketing and sales. The values obtained will reveal details about customer numbers, profit margins and sales trends, so you can identify the products that bring in the most profit and make better decisions to adapt business strategies
Specifically, point-of-sale data can be used to:

Traffic analysis (both web and in-store)
Analyzing numbers is not one of the most pleasant activities in business, but it is certainly useful to correlate all the information. For online stores, it’s important to observe website visitor behavior and evaluate performance by identifying the most effective promotion channels and traffic sources, tracking the visitor’s path once they land on a landing page, recording the amount of time spent on each page, and identifying those actions that bring in conversions.
In physical stores, you can keep track of the total number of visitors and analyse their behaviour once they cross the threshold. Based on these observations, you can draw conclusions about:

Building market research
Comprehensive market research can shed light on customer preferences and behaviour. You can access secondary data – information about industry trends or the wider context, but you can also gather primary data – information that helps you achieve your business goals, and so gain an overview of the context in which your business is operating. You’ll learn interesting things about competitors, target audiences or market trends, so you can react accordingly:

Online surveys
If you want to get direct feedback from your customers, it’s best to get their opinion directly. Set a target, formulate some relevant questions and choose the most appropriate channel to launch a customer survey. The online environment gives you the right context for a simple but relevant survey in a safe space for participants. Once you have gathered enough data, you can analyse it to understand the honest opinion of buyers about your company’s services or products.
Here’s what you can improve on from such a survey:

For retail companies, the benefits of sales data are obvious. However, it should be noted that you can only gain valuable insights if the data you collect is relevant. When done correctly, the process of data collection and analysis will allow you to build a quality customer experience to bring customers closer to your business. In doing so, you’ll increase sales and, by extension, profits.