The 3 main trends impacting retail

Today, consumers have both a wider array of shopping channels and immediate access to product information and reviews that ultimately impact their purchasing decisions. For this reason, they expect retail brands to meet them exactly wherever they are, whether it is online or in brick-and-mortar stores.
As a result, retail professionals are tapping into more and more data sources and channels to ensure customers the engaging and flexible experiences that they expect throughout their shopping journey. 

But what are the main challenges that prevent retail professionals from reaching their ideal customers?


Recent research shows 3 main trends impacting the retail landscape today:


1)    “Disconnected” retail experiences

Today, consumers expect to be reached through a variety of different channels with the right messages at the right time.
According to a recent survey conducted by Salesforce, nearly 70% of consumers want to shop from retailers that offer them a seamless customer journey across multiple channels, but only 13% of shoppers believe retailers excel at delivering connected shopping experiences.
For this reason, retail brands are investing in analyzing consumers’ needs and how they are met in-store in order to address main pain-points such as engagement and discovery (32%) and awareness and acquisition (24%).

2)    Difficulty in getting a holistic view

Technology enables retail marketers to access a huge amount of data. However, aggregating and using this data requires time and resources that are not always available at every level.
For this reason, getting a holistic, real-time view of the different aspects of the customer journey can be a challenge, especially when in-store insights are still gathered through a traditional field-marketing approach. That’s why agility is currently one of the top deficiencies for brands: more than 60% of them are not able to quickly react to insights coming from in-store observations.

3)    Focus on real-time data

In order to solve the disconnection between shoppers’ needs and expectations and the in-store experience, retail professionals must be able to access real-time insights directly from the shop floor. 
Research shows that brand leaders who reported a revenue increase of at least 10% in the past fiscal year focus on data on average almost 2 times more than their competitors.
Retailers that have actionable, real-time data at their fingertips are able to optimize execution in a more agile and intelligent manner.


Solving the challenges with Crowdsourcing

The immediacy provided by crowdsourcing allows retailers to capture real-time feedback on what’s really happening in-store.

Modern mobile technology enables the use of an on-demand workforce of hundreds of thousands of individuals who can immediately transfer data from any store at any time, including evenings, weekends and holidays.

By getting real-time access to data about shelf health, availability and promotion execution, retail professionals are able to acknowledge the main issues that could compromise the customer journey and take action to solve them in a quicker and more cost-efficient way.

The Roamler Crowd numbers more than 600.000 shoppers across Europe who can easily share insights and photos from every store across Europe. After being reviewed by an internal Roamler team, the data are aggregated in the form of live dashboards and reports.
Having all the most important KPIs at a glance allows decision makers to save resources and take immediate, data-driven actions.


Would you like to know how you can deploy crowdsourcing to improve your performance? Get in touch with our experts.

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