How to Optimize Your End-to-End Retail Journey with Data

Your customers don’t want to feel like numbers in a list. They expect to be treated as individuals and have personalized experiences with your brand.  

But unless your only customers are family and friends, you can’t reasonably deliver that kind of experience to everyone who walks through your door.  

That is unless you have data.  

In this post, we’ll look at the impact data has on 4 major aspects of the customer experience and show you the easiest way to leverage data into your eCommerce operations. Let’s get started.  

Inventory Management 

When you sell products, you need to make sure you have a healthy supply of each item. Otherwise, you run the risk of stockouts and backorders.  

Customer data makes it possible for you to have the right amount of SKUs on hand because it tracks demand in near real-time. And if coupled with predictive analytics, it can also offer you insight into your future inventory optimization needs.  

As a result, you can effectively avoid disappointing your customers, no matter what they’re purchasing.  

Order Management and Shipping 

Your customers expect their orders to reach their doorstep as fast as possible – rain or shine. In fact, shipping time is one of the most influential factors in cart abandonment and customer loyalty.  

Luckily, data can help your organization run like a well-oiled machine. You can review delivery locations to select the best fulfillment centers and carriers for each order. Plus, fulfillment teams can offer alternative fulfillment options – like BOPIS and BOPAC – to shorten order cycles for customers with long wait times.  

In both cases, this allows you to meet customer demand (even during the busy peak season), which can boost customer satisfaction and increase customer retention.  

Customer Relationship Management 

Often, we prioritize customer relationships before and during a purchase. And while data is useful in this period – offering insight that marketing and sales teams can use to win over new shoppers – it also plays a vital role in customer retention.  

More specifically, data has the capacity to shape customer service interactions. It can provide you with a clear NPS score and helpful feedback on your customer experience. Data can deliver insight into customer sentiment during customer service interactions. Using data, your support agents are also better equipped to resolve issues during the first call, rather than routing customers multiple times or leaving important issues unresolved.  

And since customers are actively looking for ways to accelerate ticket resolution time, using data to refine your customer care operations can make a huge difference to your customer satisfaction levels.  

Returns Processing 

Data is relevant to product returns in many ways. On the one hand, it enables your team to see which products and vendors should be removed from the shelves as soon as possible. But it also plays a critical role in the actual returns process.  

Using data, you can pinpoint the locations that are being overwhelmed by returns and reroute new product returns to a separate location. You can also identify new ways to incentivize in-store returns, like immediate exchanges, in-store credit, or freebies, and thereby increase customer convenience and strengthen your bottom line.  

From beginning to end, data makes a huge difference to the customer experience. It influences inventory management, improves customer relationship management, shortens order cycle time, and simplifies returns.  

And with an eCommerce operations provider like Radial, you can successfully access all of this data in one place. This enables you to make valuable changes to critical customer-facing operations and build the customer experience your shoppers crave.