THE WEEK IN RETAIL
EDITOR’S COMMENT SHARE YOUR NEWS AND VIEWS WITH ME AT ABEGLEY@55NORTH.COM
DATA’S DAY IS FAST APPROACHING IN CONVENIENCE It’s one of those weird quirks of the convenience retailing industry: we’ve never really managed to get our head around data. What it is, why it matters and what it can do for a convenience store. To all intents and purposes, we’ve acted like it doesn’t exist and it probably comes down to that age-old assumption that retailers know their customers and stores inside out without having to look at data. It was the same logic that many retailers applied when EPoS began to take hold way back when. One of the reasons this attitude is weird is that almost everyone we compete with relies on data to quite a significant extent. Supermarkets are getting increasingly good at collecting and analysing all sorts of data to help inform action of one sort or another. And, of course, online retail is 100% reliant on data. Yes, you can try to argue that a local retailer knows his customers better than Amazon know theirs – but Jeff Bezos’s billions might persuade some people otherwise.
So it was extremely encouraging and just a little surprising to read the latest TWC report (which you can find in this issue) which asked retailers whether they were capturing and using customer data and whether they thought it was important. A frankly astonishing 53% said they were already capturing and using data while over half of all the retailers surveyed viewed doing so as ‘very important’. This change of heart is probably being driven by the explosion of home delivery, with retailers now gaining access to lots of juicy data about who’s buying what, when and how often and so on. The power of data is difficult to exaggerate. As the TWC report notes, everything your customers ever do is data – and that data offers unbelievable scope for retailers to improve business efficiencies, to enhance the customer experience and, ultimately, to sell more. Your customers live in a data-driven age and expect the personalised, tailored, relevant, timely experience that data can offer. Now is very much the time to embrace that opportunity.
ANTONYBEGLEY ANTONYBEGLEY ANTONYBEGLEY
ANTONY BEGLEY, EDITOR
WEDNESDAY 17TH JUNE 2020 / ISSUE 9 / SLRMAG.CO.UK / 3
