By Vishnu Bhat
To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumours of the death of Australian retail are highly exaggerated – with digital sales providing a much-needed injection to the sector. Online retail in Australia defied the traditional post-Christmas slump with a surprising 27 per cent surge year-on-year this January, and the total purse for online shopping is in Australia projected at $26.9 billion by 2016.
This explosion of digital has naturally resulted in an increase in omni-channel consumerism. Consumers will make their own choices about where and when to connect according to their own convenience – leaving retailers the need to create a seamless and immersive experience, and the opportunity to collect data through more sources than ever before. Every day, the trail of digital breadcrumbs we leave grows wider – 80 per cent year-on-year – as we browse, click, tweet, post, scan, purchase.
With estimates that omni-channel consumers spend as much as 71 per cent more than single-channel shoppers, retailers are now scrambling to join the revolution, and extract maximum value from this ‘omni-channel data.’ Thus far, they have focused their analytical efforts on structured data: neatly ordered into point-of-sale systems and warehouse management databases, and perfectly amenable to queries about customer names, loyalty card numbers or stock levels.
But there is a hidden goldmine here as well: one which pre-dates the rise of e-commerce. Retailers have accumulated – and largely ignored – a vast, growing repository of unstructured and historical data over the years. It is stored on hard drives, CDs, customer call logs, old databases and more recently the Internet, with the rise of customer review websites and social media.
At Infosys, we call this unstructured data the ‘dark secret’ of retailers. It is estimated that unstructured information makes up 80% of an enterprise’s data resources. This means retailers could be 80 per cent in the dark when it comes to insights about their business.
Retailers need Big Data innovation that straddles the entire data and analytics value chain to unlock these valuable insights and allow rapid, actionable decisions. Omni-channel activity adds up to millions of transactions and customer interactions so retailers need access to everything –internal and external data sources, structured and unstructured, document management systems, customer call logs and social networks – all at once, with ease, in real time.
As consumers have shifted to non-linear buying patterns – perhaps browsing online, ‘showrooming’ in-store, purchasing on a mobile device, returning an online purchase in-store only to increase the total sale through exposure to cross-sell opportunities – it becomes more challenging to achieve this holistic understanding. (Some smart retailers have worked out that providing wi-fi hotspots is one way to help bridge the digital divide of the omni-channel consumers.) Shining a light on the ‘dark secret’ of unstructured data and complex patterns can help retailers regain power and insight into their business.
For example, let us imagine that this year brings an unseasonably hot Easter. Big Data could allow a retailer to tap into trending topics on social media, and marry these with historical insights about shopping and call centre patterns during particular weather conditions. That retailer might then respond with compelling personalised coupons via SMS and Facebook. Did I mention that these promotions would go first to identified digital influencers with wide social networks – in near real-time?
Retailer appetites are whetted with enthusiasm but until very recently they could only vaguely guess at the potential of Big Data; most still don’t know the best way to harness it or exactly what to look for.
In the near future lies a 360 degree view of customers, covering all transactions, historical data and external data feeds, including social networks. Savvy retailers will unleash the power of this data to better target customers, drive loyalty and increase efficiency.
At the end of the digital breadcrumb trail, it is all about appealing to the consumer’s desire. It is about connecting with the consumer across all touch points to provide a seamless experience across bricks and clicks. With Big Data, consumers experience the brand, not the channel.
Vishnu Bhat is Infosys’ VP and Global Head – Cloud and Big Data. He is also the former COO of Infosys Australia.