With digital strategies dominating the retail space in the post-COVID world, too many retailers are missing key qualitative insights by only focusing on the numbers. By truly understanding customer motivations, retailers can build ideal customer profiles, which can be invaluable year-round—and smart video platforms can be the engine that drives these insights, says Scott Fasser, VP of marketing, Discuss.io.
As we reach the end of 2020—with the holiday shopping season in full swing—it is difficult to discern any lessons to take from the last 12 months beyond this: retailers need to be ready to adapt. The COVID-19 crisis has wrought so much uncertainty that attempting to map any kind of trend or strategy is a fool’s errand, doomed to be upended by impossible-to-predict externalities.
In these eras of uncertainty, the retailers that will be in advantageous positions going forward are those that not only possess the agility to move with the market but base their actions on insights that demonstrate a true understanding of their customers. With much of the world still sorting out pandemic response and reopening measures, it is clear that retailers will be reliant on digital strategies for the near future; and maybe forever. The natural response from retailers can be to stick with tried-and-true digital quantitative analysis, basing their strategy on what customers are doing.
By merely focusing on the ‘what’, retailers miss the deeper understanding of ‘why’ a customer behaves a certain way. Adding a more qualitative approach and talking to customers enables marketers and retailers to determine customer feelings and motivations on a much deeper level, which is increasingly vital information to have in such an emotionally raw period in history.
By understanding customer motivations, retailers can create much more insightful profiles around who their ideal customer is. With this information readily available, they can act near real-time, which can help adapt holiday strategies to be most effective in the short term and reverberate across strategies year-round. The most crucial facilitator of these insights may very well be smart video platforms, which offer face-to-face customer interactions while preserving safety and offering instant recap tools to make insights immediately actionable.
Learn More: 4 Ways Retailers Can Bring the Joy of Holiday Shopping To Ecommerce
How Smart Video Helps Answer the “Why†Behind Customer Actions
Smart video platforms draw a distinction from typical video chat through their range of integrations and tools for gathering insights. With built-in workflow tools, presentation tools like discussion guides and whiteboards, and post-interview recap tools like multi-language, searchable transcripts, earmarked video clip highlights, and more, smart video platforms offer a professional context for retailers to gain key qualitative insights through structured dialogue with customers.
When marketers and retailers take a purely quantitative approach to the way customers interact with not only their websites but emails, content, and advertisements, they are only getting part of the story. Customers may be hitting points of friction in the shopping and buying processes, but retailers will not necessarily know what those roadblocks are based on simple cart abandonment numbers, for example.
In a structured conversation, a retailer can observe customers in their website interactions, guiding them through every point of their journey, and gauge their responses to fully understand not only what actions they are performing, but why they are performing them, and further, how they feel about those interactions.
Through a smart video platform, retailers and marketers can allow customers to do “pre-work†before a scheduled conversation. This pre-work can include a photo and video capture of a customer interacting with a website at multiple points on their journey and can be used as fodder for a guided conversation that can yield actionable insights. During the holidays, especially, with multiple offers running concurrently, or site structures changing for promotions, customer motivations and qualitative insights to their experience can offer retailers the opportunity to alter user experience in near real-time. This can create the best chance for success during critical shopping seasons.
By Understanding the “Whyâ€, Marketers Can Build More Informed Customer Profiles
Through the deployment of smart video, the qualitative insights afforded to retailers and marketers can be used to tailor experiences in the short term as well as draw trends and points of comparison among customers to help build an ideal customer profile. The ability to take conversations to a deeper level with customers through focused discussions allows retailers to catalog prevailing moods and change messaging to suit their ideal customer better. It is an opportunity to have some white space in thinking that allows comments, facial expressions, body language, and reactions from consumers to spark ideas and insights.
During the holidays, for example, retailers can use conversations with customers to draw distinctions between certain customer types, like early shoppers versus late shoppers, and build points of comparison among those profile types. It could be that late shoppers have a higher likelihood of being anxious around the holidays and respond better to a reassuring tone in messaging. In contrast, early shoppers are more casual in their shopping approach and respond better to discount messaging.
By incorporating qualitative analysis, bolstered by the insight tools available in smart video platforms, retailers are given the opportunity to fully understand how customers are responding to their products, as well as their general values and moods. Connecting qualitative trends gives retailers the insights they need to build their ideal customer profile beyond demographic or web traffic data.
Customer Profiles Can Be Deployed Quickly for the Holidays, and Instructive Beyond
One of the main benefits of qualitative data analysis is its ability to provide immediate insights that can be deployed essentially in real-time. Through smart video platforms, customer conversations are made immediately actionable through a series of post-meeting recap tools like highlighted video clips, complete, searchable transcripts, and integrated notes capabilities. As the holiday shopping season gets down to the wire, being agile enough to update strategies as motivations shift and trends emerge to build robust customer profiles is potentially make or break for retailers. Pairing qualitative data with the dynamic nature of ecommerce retail gives retailers the opportunity to fine-tune messages and test strategies late into the holiday season.
But it is also worth noting that the holiday season is extending later and later each year. And after the holidays, retailers have to be ready to run with strategies for people returning products or spending with gift cards. The insights gleaned over the holidays are invaluable for the weeks and months after the season traditionally ends.
Building customer profiles through qualitative analysis can be critical for implementing a successful holiday strategy, but the benefits can reverberate year-round. Because these qualitative insights are snapshots of an ideal customer’s feelings and motivations at a certain point in time, retailers and marketers can track how prevailing attitudes are changing within those identified groups and adjust messages accordingly throughout the year. By identifying an ideal customer profile based on qualitative analysis, shifting motivations can be seen as broader trends that can be messaged towards well beyond the scope of the holidays.
Likewise, if products are launched towards the end of the year, retailers and marketers can use analysis of early buyers’ feelings and adjust the product offering or enhance the customer journey based on hands-on experience with a product.
Learn More: Five New Rules To Reel-In Shoppers This Holiday Season
At the end of the day, the greatest gift a retailer or marketer can get is a true understanding of what motivates their customers. Smart video enables an open line of dialogue specially structured and suited to extract these insights, helping build ideal customer profiles throughout the year.
Key Takeaways:
- As digital strategies become more essential than ever in a post-COVID world, it can be easy for retailers to rely on quantitative data analysis. But they are only getting part of the story. Qualitative analysis gleaned through customer conversations can help determine customer motivations (the why) behind their actions (the what).
- By focusing on qualitative analysis, retailers can draw trends in customer motivations and feelings to create more robust profiles of their ideal customers, leading to actionable data used to build holiday strategies.
- These ideal customer profiles can be tracked year-round to determine broader moods and trends, informing strategies far beyond the holidays.