Cost of living impact: 3-step plan for improving your retail operations

Businesses should focus on their brand, the technology they have integrated into their online journeys, and providing the best possible customer experience during this uncertain period. At the heart of this lies customer data, and the question is: Is your data accurate and clean enough to ensure good customer outcomes online, at the point of delivery and beyond? Do you trust your business’ data to deliver on your brand’s promise to customers? Inaccurate customer information, like misspelled mailing addresses or emails, leads to failed deliveries, leaving you with returned-mail fines, additional delays on shipments, and a rise in customer service complaints bogging down your staff.

If your product data is out of date, you may be sending the wrong products to your customers or supplying your warehouses with insufficient or surplus goods. If the contact data you have is correct and up to date, it will allow you to effectively communicate with each customer. Unsatisfied customers and distrust about your brand’s ability to deliver, especially during a cost of living crisis, can quickly lead to a significant drop in customer loyalty and lost business to a competing brand.

Poor data quality can have real-time negative impacts on your operations and hurt the chances of your retail organisation overcoming this new normal. It’s time to shift course and fix the quality of your data—we can help with that.

Steps retailers can take to improve and streamline operations—starting with quality data.

1. Clean up your existing data

First, ensure that your existing data is clean by profiling, standardising, and resolving duplicate records. You and your business users will not only have an accurate, holistic view of your contact data, clean data also promotes multiple cross business benefits including:

• Collaboration across departments
• Better internal communication on business initiatives
• Warehouses stocked with the right amount of inventory
• Packages delivered to correct addresses
• Emails delivered to the correct inboxes
• Customers targeted across optimal digital platforms

Experian’s Data Cleanse helped UK construction recruitment agency, Optima Site Solutions, refine their candidate data resulting in cost and time savings. Optima Site Solutions partnered with us to boost its data integrity. The objective was to identify and exclude candidates that were not contactable via email and/or phone, protect its email sender reputation and enable cost savings on communications. Data cleansing is an essential part of your data management strategy. The cleanse gave the agency an up-to-date view of the size of its candidate pool.

Bulk email cleanse in Aperture Data Studio

Furthermore, by implementing real-time data validation, these built-in checks at multiple data points to ensure that the data that enters your database is captured accurately.

Real-time email validation

Output of real-time email validation

2. Automate data quality checks in your online shopping cart

Shopping basket/cart abandonment is an important metric for ecommerce success, but it is estimated approximately 81 percent¹ of orders on mobile devices in the UK were not completed.

By incorporating real-time data capture and validation into your checkout processes, you can benefit from growth by speeding up transactions and reducing unnecessary correction fees like shipping charges. This removes friction from the user’s checkout process. Plus enjoy broader business benefits from clean, accurate data – ensure you can contact customers when needed and improve customer insight, profiling, and targeting to support strategy, planning, and decision-making.

Realtime address validation integrated into Bunches eCommerce website

Bunches is one of the growing online florists in the UK, significantly improving their delivery rates and operational efficiencies using Experian address validation technology and eCommerce integration. The address validation solution is embedded in their eCommerce website and CRM system. The solution is powered by authoritative postal data from Royal Mail, quickly captures accurate and complete addresses for their customers in the UK, helps customers to complete their online orders quickly, and ensures that addresses entered are valid.

Experian has helped Bunches to deliver “happiness” to their customers. For example, in the run up to Mother’s Day, Bunches was processing daily volumes greater than they had seen in the last few months previously. Experian’s Address Validation solution ensured that all addresses were accurate, completed and formatted, which enabled Bunches to process more orders smoothly and significantly improve the accuracy of their customer deliveries.

3. Unlock customer insight with data enrichment

Delivering and sustaining an exceptional eCommerce experience starts with a data-driven culture built on trusted customer data. By enriching your data, your organisation opens up new information about your customers while also making sure your existing data is accurate. Enrichment often uses reliable third-party data sources to find more information on customer contact information or other data. Now more than ever, if organisations want to get the most of their data, to support with their key strategies and beyond, trusted and accurate data quality is a must.

When businesses leverage data enrichment to drive customer satisfaction, leaning on their consumer data to help them stay consistent with consumer buying habits, in turn enabling them to improve the customer buying journey. Experian’s Data Enrichment and Location Intelligence is a perfect solution for any retail company that is looking to better understand who their customers are and what they care about.

Extend your customer postal address information by using data about the property where the customer lives. You can enrich your existing records with location datasets that can provide you with information on property taxes, dwelling types, or geocoding for more accurate delivery. Combined with supplementing missing or incomplete demographic and lifestyle insights, retailers can tailor their offerings and messaging to meet consumer needs. This will help build confidence in the customer relationship and lead to a successful shopping experience.

Mosaic 7: Types 66 Sub Levels with detailed insights

Experian’s Mosaic gives you the intelligence you need to reach the right people with the right message at the right time – every time. Mosaic is a comprehensive set of customer data that segments consumers based on geography, demographics, socioeconomic status, household dynamics, and other factors. You can effectively personalise your customer experience. Through detailed catchment analysis retailers can optimise resources and ensure you have the right product mix to meet the demands of your customers and drive sales growth.