Accenture’s Senior Managing Director and Head of Retail, Jill Standish, penned an article for Women’s Wear Daily titled How Do You Find the Customers That Matter? The piece discusses how retailers can harness their data to meet customers’ evolving expectations and continue growth and includes findings from the Fall 2018 DynamicAction Retail Index.

Key excerpts include: “To generate the maximum value from this data, retailers need to apply analytics on an enterprise scale, across areas including revenue drivers, marketing costs, fulfillment costs and digital levers for customer behavior. The misalignment between what customers want and what’s being made available could have detrimental consequences on profit and customer retention.

According to the DynamicAction Retail Index: “2018 Analysis & Holiday Outlook,” available inventory that shoppers were actually viewing was down 3 percent year-to-date 2018, with an average decrease of 13 percent in the month of August 2018 versus August 2017. A strong indication that as retailers headed into a significant seasonal shopping time period — Labor Day — shoppers were not able to find the items they truly wanted to purchase.

The aligned digitally enabled organization will gain a true picture of how each individual customer is behaving and how each product is performing.  Then they’ll be in a position to learn the right lessons from their data — by focusing not on margin-eroding, mass market promotions, but on those high-value customers that deliver most of the profit.”

Key questions to ask:

As a retailer, how can you be sure you’re maximizing the value of consumer data? Here are some key questions to ask yourself:

• What percentage of your upcoming revenue plan will come from existing customers?
• What’s your rate of acquisition of new customers?
• What’s your rate of repurchase from 1st to 2nd, 2nd to 3rd, 3rd to 4th, 4th to nth? And how do those rates trend over a 12-month period?
• What percentage of your customer base is loss-making?
• How much of the inventory that your customers want to buy do you have in stock?