Minute by minute, hour by hour, your customers are speaking to you with every purchase they make or do not make. They keep speaking and speaking but you don’t answer back because you cannot hear them. It is like your customers are dialing your phone number, letting it ring and ring, yet you never answer.
Why, how can that be? Fundamentally there are two disconnects that keep retailers from answering the phone. Retailers are not technologists. And technologists are not retailers. So the phone continues to ring and ring without being answered.
“Oh yes, we are doing that! Says every retailer. Yes, we are using personalization, dynamic this and that…. So you ask them, what is the “that" of ”that?"
Retailers still use subjective, anecdotal evidence to make expensive business decisions.
Yes, the retail industry does need to change its thinking. It is not about the technology, yet technology is the only vehicle that can process and humanize the massive amounts of data collected by most large-scale retailers.
Hiding in plain sight, a plethora of rich, sensory-driven, customer product feedback. Hiding in plain sight, a treasure trove of sensory-rich individual customer preference intelligence. Yet, the phone keeps ringing and ringing.
As retailers, our mantra is to "listen" to the customer. How can we as retailers "listen" to millions of customers at once? With the "that."