The FINANCIAL — Consumers are willing to share their personal information with retailers, particularly if they get good value in exchange, according to the recent IBM study.
The percentage of consumers willing to share their current location via GPS with retailers nearly doubled year-over-year to 36 percent. Thirty-eight percent of consumers would provide their mobile number for the purpose of receiving text messages and 32 percent would share their social handles with retailers.
While omnichannel retailing — the practice of providing consumers a connected, personalized experience across online, mobile and in-store channels — is the stated goal of nearly every retailer, consumers aren’t asking for it per se. They simply expect to be able to use their technology in all aspects of their life, including how they shop.
Consumers fall into four distinct groups differentiated by their interest in and use of social, location and mobile technologies while shopping, found the IBM study. Nineteen percent of consumers surveyed lag behind the majority of the population when it came to using technology to shop. Another 40 percent of shoppers use social, location and mobile technologies for information gathering, but are not likely to use them to purchase products. Twenty-nine percent use social, location and mobile much more extensively, for everything from researching products to ordering goods. Twelve percent of consumers surveyed are classified as “Trailblazers,” those who use these technologies across channels and base their choice of retailer on whether they make that possible.
Consumers are increasingly shopping online. In 2013, 84 percent of shoppers surveyed by IBM chose the store to make their last non-grocery purchase. This year, that figure dropped to 72 percent. Surprisingly, “showrooming” — the practice of browsing goods at a store, but ultimately buying them online — is not behind this online growth. While more respondents showroomed this year (eight percent vs. six percent last year), only about 30 percent of all online purchases actually resulted from showrooming — a drop from nearly 50 percent last year. Seventy percent of online purchases were made by shoppers that went directly to the web.
Omnichannel retailing is not just a challenge of data volume — Big Data — but really a challenge of broad data. Omnichannel requires retailers to combine all customer interaction data — be it from the store, online or a mobile device — with external data from social media, video and sensors. The problem for many retailers is not only combining all this information together to form a consolidated view of a customer, but also reacting to it in a timely manner. Consumers are expecting retailers to learn from their interaction so recommendations and offers are personalized. Retailers should look to cloud computing to support their omnichannel strategy as it provides retailers the fastest, most efficient way to bring broad sets of data together in a single, secure platform, according to IBM study.
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