Introduction

How does your company handle the display and promotion of products, and is your approach focused on your customer’s needs?

Welcome to the next chapter of the experience story — the customer-centricity experience. As an industry-leading provider of retail analytics, EDITED can help you understand not only when, where, and how your customers interact with your brand (and your competitors), but also what products they desire.

By listening to your customers and incorporating their insights throughout the merchandising process, you can establish customer-centricity as a fundamental aspect of your organization. This approach can lead to various benefits, such as increased full-price sales, optimized inventory and margins, enhanced customer profitability, and improved customer loyalty. In fact, according to a 2017 report by Deloitte, companies that prioritize customer-centricity are 60% more profitable compared to those that don’t. 

Now is the time to optimize your brand’s merchandising experience through a customer-centric strategy. Use EDITED’s Customer-Centricity Self-Assessment Index to evaluate your current practices and identify where you can further enhance your efforts. 

EDITED’s Customer-Centricity Self-Assessment Index Guide 

EDITED’s Customer-Centricity Self-Assessment Index presents a series of thought-provoking questions and criteria, taking into account customer preferences, assortment planning, pricing strategies, and the overall customer experience.

Upon completion of the assessment, your business will receive a score based on four distinct categories:

• Novice
• Advanced Beginner
• Competent
• Proficient

Below we define the characteristics of each score level, and provide actionable solutions to propel your retail business toward the next level of customer-centric merchandising. 

Level 1: Novice 

Your current merchandising process is very traditional and product-focused. With this product-centric mindset, you’re likely prioritizing product features, quality, and historical performance to price and determine buy-quantities above other, customer-centric factors. Your primary goal is to drive sales and generate revenue. You are focused on metrics such as units sold, and gross margin and are mainly looking at historical, internal sales performance data.  

By taking our Customer-Centricity Self-Assessment you clearly understand the importance of customer-centricity. You may be in the early stages of implementing customer-focused strategies, like localizing assortment and pricing architectures for customers across regions and channels.

How can you optimize your merchandising experience with a customer-centric approach?

To create a more customer-centric merchandising experience, you’ll want to invest in tools and systems that will allow you to better understand your customer preferences. Your main priority is to gather customer feedback, A crucial first step is to fully understand the market  from your customers’ perspective. Use EDITED’s retail analytics platform to gain valuable insights into the key players in your market, emerging trends, how competitors’ assortments are structured and the pricing and discounting activity that customers are responding to.

Level 2: Advanced Beginner

At the advanced beginner level, your retail business has made progress in understanding customer needs and preferences and consistently analyzes the market to make customer focused decisions. You’ve already implemented some customer-centric initiatives, and likely improved the customers’ experience with better communication, more aligned pricing and the right products in your assortment.

However, the implementation of customer-centric merchandising practices remains somewhat restricted, lacking the integration of customer insights and preferences into assortment planning and merchandising decisions. The absence of available connected data is impacting your ability to successfully merchandise across multiple channels. Although basic attempts at personalization based on general customer segments or demographics may exist, personalized recommendations and customized product assortments are not yet fully realized.

How can you optimize your merchandising experience with a customer-centric approach?

Optimizing your merchandising experience means developing a deeper understanding of your target audience by further leveraging customer and selling channel data and analytics. You need more advanced segmentation techniques to deliver more personalized experiences and a holistic view of performance across your whole business to define better merchandising strategies across each one. 

EDITED’s retail analytics platform will provide your business with comprehensive data and insights on customer behavior, preferences, and buying patterns by channel. This allows your business to perform advanced customer segmentation based on various criteria such as demographics and purchasing habits. You’ll be able to understand your customers at a deeper level and tailor your merchandising strategies accordingly. You can then use this information to optimize assortment, pricing and promotional activity by focusing these inputs around key customers. This will support in driving more profitable outcomes, delivering more personalized and localized promotions, and personalized communication strategies.

Level 3: Competent Level

At the competent level, your retail business has a well-established customer-centric approach. You have a deep understanding of your target audience and actively tailor your products, services, and experiences to meet customer demands. This level may involve advanced customer segmentation, data-driven decision-making, and proactive customer engagement strategies.

How can you optimize your merchandising experience with a customer-centric approach?

To become proficient at customer-centric merchandising, your entire organization must understand the value of customer-centricity and work collectively to deliver exceptional experiences. Unlock data siloes from across the business and encourage transparency   from planning to merchandising and buying to digital and marketing to ensure that key data points are being connected and  allowing you to unlock valuable new metrics.

EDITED can assist your business in providing training and education to employees regarding customer-centric best practices. By leveraging connected data, cross-functional teams gain access to previously unseen insights and analysis which drive customer-centric planning, trading and marketing strategies. 

Level 4: Proficient Level 

At the proficient level, your retail business excels in customer-centric merchandising and consistently exceeds customer expectations. You’ll have a customer-first culture, and deliver highly personalized experiences, exceptional customer service, seamless omnichannel integration, and continuous innovation based on customer feedback.

How can you optimize your merchandising experience with a customer-centric approach?

Be sure you’re always fostering an organization that works cross-functionally. Sharing resources, data sources and insights is key, and ongoing investment in organizational process improvements and team building are crucial. Furthermore, de-avergaging your customer and focusing on more granular activities at scale can only be achieved with automation. But your automated actions need to be enriched with profit and customer focused insights to truly drive a customer-centric experience. Our AI-driven retail intelligence platform will ensure your teams are able to surface and action the most crucial data points so you can surgically merchandise, price and market your product at a customer-level to maximize profit. 

Create an Optimized Customer-Centric Experience With EDITED

Moving from one level to the next in your customer-centric journey requires increasing the connection of your data (customer, marketing and competitor) and increasing automation activity. It’s a combination of understanding your customer needs, gathering insights (both internally and externally), implementing personalization strategies, fostering a customer-centric culture, and leveraging advanced technologies. Merchandising experience is an ongoing journey that involves continuous improvement and adaptation based on changing customer expectations and market dynamics.

EDITED understands the commitment and changes a business must make to create a more customer-centric experience. As such, our platform will assist your retail business in focusing on the merchandising experience through a range of services and solutions. With our expertise in connecting business analytics and external market data, EDITED offers valuable resources that enable businesses to align their merchandising strategies and operations with customer needs and preferences.