Cutting Costs, Not Corners
In the grips of a cost-of-living crisis, customer retention is more crucial for retailers than ever. However, with business prices following the same upward trend, balancing fantastic customer experiences with frugal price tags is a challenge.
In this double roundtable, the BRC were joined by Partners Snowflake and Google to share strategies for cutting costs without cutting corners.
This event focused on the changing landscape of retail, the current economic climate straining businesses and consumers, balancing costs and benefits, and techniques for designing a seamless customer experience that prioritises customer loyalty, return on interest and lifetime value.
In unpredictable times, the insights shared in this double roundtable not only help to support retailers navigating today’s financial crisis, but also provide actionable steps to retain value into the future.
What was discussed in the Cutting Costs Not Corners sessions?
In Google’s session, Sophie Birshan, Industry Head of Retail, explored the latest consumer insights to inform retailers’ business strategies. As well as giving a glimpse into the mindset of customers, Google highlighted the common features of retailers successfully navigating change, supporting BRC members to retain customer loyalty and overcome financial challenges.
Consolidating this, Snowflake’s Head of Retail & CPG GTM Paul Winsor emphasised the potential of the data economy, shining a light on strategies retailers can use to monetise their data. From overcoming silos to protecting against potential vulnerabilities, Snowflake demonstrated the capabilities of the Data Cloud to keep up with the rapidly changing retail industry and boost the efficiency of business operations.
Below, hear some of the key takeaways from Google's session.
Key insight from our double roundtable
Google presented on three consumer trends that are shaping the future: accelerated information and inspiration-seeking across channels, a fall in loyalty, and consumers setting higher expectations for interacting with retailers and advertising in a personal and relevant way.
Looking to the future, younger consumers are accelerating these trends further, particularly by using new visual formats and looking online for inspiration. Considering these trends, Google shared research and benchmarking data on three capabilities retailers need to thrive in future: being able to implement technology fast, fuelling algorithms with data, and having confidence and alignment in how the organisation measure impact.
However, benchmarking reveals very high variation in how fast retailers are adopting new technology, with many opportunities to use data better. In particular, there was a discussion on how to overcome silos so that finance, marketing and analytics teams can get on the same page when it comes to measuring impact, setting targets and prioritising projects, allowing the retailer to move faster.
Sophie Birshan, Industry Head of Retail, Google
Conclusions
Discussions from our roundtables solidified the importance of putting your customer and colleague retention at the heart of business operations: these are key areas to protect when considering reducing costs. Areas such as marketing spend and data management were identified as areas for optimisation, driven by the insights from our Partners.
As well as this, retailers discussed best practice for retaining cost-cautious consumers, such as loyalty programmes, pricing strategies and the value of clean data.
For BRC members unable to attend this event, look out for upcoming in-person events in our Digital Transformation series. Each event is full of unique strategies to boost your business in today’s competitive landscape.