Nearly everyone in retail knows the value of personalisation. Getting there, however, can be a problem. Here’s how your retail store can be a business that better understands the customer.

Personalising the shopping experience is the surest way to the consumer’s pocket. Consumers buy more and buy more often when products are relevant to them. What’s more, they like receiving offers that are targeted not just at customers like them, but at them as individuals.

Not many retailers measure up

Personalisation is a huge positive for customers, but few retailers hit the levels customers expect. Despite research saying almost two-thirds of millennials (63%) would pay more for improved personalisation, only 11% of retail executives believe their employees have the tools and information needed to give consumers a personalised experience.

This gap between consumer demand for improved personalisation and a retailer’s ability to deliver is cause for concern. The lack of understanding of customer needs affects the quality of the overall customer experience provided. It leaves customers feeling like they are being treated like a number, not a person.

The fact is, retailers today are accumulating increasing amounts of customer data. This includes data about dining, cleaning and the health status of customers. And through in-store POS systems, it includes insights into basket size, traffic by hour and sales trends.

So how do you take all this data across channels, time periods and at different instances in a customer’s lifetime – and join it all together to form a single view?

A complete customer picture

With SAS Customer Intelligence solutions, it’s possible to create this complete customer profile. With SAS you can create a 360-degree view – from both customer-level digital data and traditional data sources. The result is a far deeper customer understanding. It means contextual customer engagement across inbound and outbound channels and compelling customer experiences tailored to each unique customer journey.

At SAS, we provide retailers with the data insights that drive the future of retail and strengthen the relationships that retailers have with customers. You’ll find more information on what we do and why leading retailers such as Levi Strauss choose to work with us here.