This is the time of giving, but buying is what fuels the holiday season. Retailers lick their chops for final the few months of every calendar year, and data is the key to enjoying the feast. The holiday shopping season overall saw a 3% rise in sales, with a marked ascension of online sales measuring 49% between October 11 and December 24, according to CNN. Opening a portal to buyer behavior enables a new day for retailers both in-store and online, and network data will be central to paving the way.
Success in retail starts and ends with the customer experience. While consumers on the at large lack faith in modern customer service, leveraging year over year customer data, enables an organization to plan-ahead. Monitoring bandwidth and other network resources introduces further insight into when, where and how to implement improvements.
For instance, management knows when it is the time to start planning network expansion for a sales surge. Network capacity can play a pivotal role in CX, as poor phone quality, glitchy connectivity and sales processing hiccups definitely put a damper on the aesthetic – and the bottom line.
Engagement is the crown jewel of CX, and by mining available data from season to season or campaign to campaign, a retailer can touch customers more effectively. Holding buyer attention is a challenge at the very least, but by accessing this wealth of knowledge a business knows mobile and SMS outreach can affect loyalty and the bottom line. In Q3 2020 alone, we saw a 97% jump in the use of SMS as an engagement tool, and projected as major revenue driver for retailers with conversion rates continuing to climb nearly 100% year over year.
Moving in-store, network data delivers a wealth of knowledge. From a high level, a retailer can track events, like when COVID-19 initially closed doors or a new product release. By labeling and identifying anomalies, a retailer can prepare for what lies ahead. An organization can reconfigure retail store layout or footprint based on user traffic and patterns or management can assign team members to areas of high density where shoppers are spending more time. Take this analysis a step further, a retail firm can find value in tracking metrics like anonymous footfall traffic or dwell time with competitors.
The unlimited data horizon creates competitive advantage. ExtremeCloud IQ delivers comprehensive data analytics retention. With historical data analytics, a retailer can corral granular insight into user, device and performance data, well as service delivery and network behavior. Find diagnostics, regulatory compliance, MI/AL analytics and robust reporting with a few clicks of the mouse.
Possessing the functionality to compare and analyze Black Friday data across multiple years, for instance, allows a retailer to benchmark network performance and shopper behavior, and discover value from the wealth of data collected to drive bottom line results.
As we come to the close of 2020, and begin putting 2021 resolutions in place embracing the unlimited data horizon can pay dividends the entire year.
