From talking to our Retail Hive members, it is clear that in order to drive the transformation agenda in favour of customer analytics, advocates are needed at Board Level.  This will ensure a data-led culture develops throughout the business, at every level and data is not just consigned to one area.

Of course best practices for drawing insights from customer analytics vary across organisations; where some have invested in building mature capabilities which consolidate the 360 degree customer view across all channels of engagement, others don’t yet know where to start, but all agree that analytics is a critical success factor for the future.

Have a look at the top takeaways from our ‘Connected Customer’ report focusing analytics and insight to deepen customer engagement:

1. Have a plan! Figure out how you’re going to use the data to benefit the customer so you can plan the framework.
2. Make sure you take action from the data and not just building data capabilities.
3. Clean data will give you the insight that allows you to personalise customer engagement.
4. Merge publicly available macro data with internal data. In the future there could be          potential to utilise Westfield/ Google data who would then encompasses all our shopping patterns for a personalised experience.
5. Machine learning – start with building your algorithms yourself and use off the shelf tools to support your own internal efforts.
6. Define objectives for business case before approaching analytics.
7. Personalisation through AI is the best way to engage with consumers. However, Personalisation only works if you’re capturing data from all touch points.
8. Important to have time advocacy of a data driven culture from executive management.
9. Look at off the shelf modelling to serve B2C retail – if we don’t have data scientists internally. When looking at data you must review the organisation’s capability such as data engineers.
10. Use data to benefit the user and not serve promotions.