Customer knowledge: how to boost your retail sales

In today’s fast-evolving market, standing out means delivering a truly personalized customer experience. The cornerstone of this is customer knowledge—understanding who your customers are, what they want, and how they interact with your brand. This insight can make a significant difference in driving sales and building customer loyalty.

So, how can you use customer knowledge to tailor the shopping experience and deliver the right offer to the right customer at the right time? What data should you focus on, and how can you maximize its potential to boost your operational margins? This article answers all these questions.

Understanding customer data

Why is customer knowledge important?

In retail, customer knowledge means deeply understanding your customers—their needs, preferences, purchasing habits, and interactions with your brand. This understanding is crucial for tailoring experiences, anticipating expectations, and delivering products and services that match market trends.

Customer knowledge plays a pivotal role in driving sales growth for several reasons:

1. Personalized experiences: Understanding customer needs and preferences allows you to customize offerings, delivering products and services that meet expectations. This fosters loyalty and boosts satisfaction.
2. Targeted marketing strategies: Insight into buying behaviors helps you create targeted and efficient campaigns to attract and retain customers. It also enables better market segmentation and more impactful messaging.
3. Stronger customer relationships: Actively listening to and understanding your customers’ needs improves service quality, anticipates potential issues, and delivers tailored solutions. This builds trust and fosters long-term relationships.

Analyzing customer data

Customer knowledge relies on collecting and analyzing critical types of data, including:

• Transactional data: purchase history, average cart value, and purchase frequency.
• Behavioral data: interactions across sales channels (in-store, online, and mobile) as well as shopping journeys.
• Demographic data: age, gender, and geographic location.
• Customer feedback: reviews, comments, and complaints.
• Loyalty program insights: accumulated points, redeemed benefits, and wishlists.

This data is a goldmine for retailers. It enables personalized experiences by tailoring offers to customers’ preferences and needs—such as recommending products that match their favorite sports activities. Additionally, this data helps optimize product assortments by analyzing customer purchasing behaviors, allowing retailers to align inventory with market trends. By anticipating demand and adjusting stock levels, retailers can improve inventory management. Finally, customer segmentation based on demographic, behavioral, or geographic criteria enhances marketing efforts, enabling personalized offers that strengthen loyalty.

Enhancing the customer experience in retail

The ultimate goal of leveraging customer knowledge is to create a highly personalized shopping experience. Improving the customer experience relies on the personalization strategies you implement in your sports retail stores.

Multichannel journeys: a presence both online and offline

In today’s digital age, hybrid shopping journeys are a reality retailers cannot ignore. Currently, 52% of French consumers combine online and offline shopping, and 44% practice ROPO (Research Online, Purchase Offline)—conducting online research before visiting a store to complete their purchase.

Shopping habits such as store-to-web, web-to-store, or click-and-collect foster a seamless and personalized experience. For instance, customers can discover products in-store, reserve or complete purchases online, and pick them up in-store. These options offer flexibility and align with consumer expectations.

Omnichannel retail: a seamless and unified experience

Omnichannel strategies and unified commerce are essential for providing a consistent and smooth customer experience across all sales channels. By integrating multiple touchpoints (physical stores, websites, mobile apps, social media), retailers can deliver a personalized omnichannel experience, allowing customers to transition seamlessly between channels.

At the heart of this approach, unified commerce centralizes customer data and inventory, providing real-time visibility and streamlining purchasing, delivery, and returns. By adopting an omnichannel and unified strategy, sports retailers enhance satisfaction, strengthen loyalty with tailored shopping journeys, and improve commercial performance.

Phygital: reducing friction in stores

Phygital solutions in sports retail help reduce friction by blending physical and digital elements to create a personalized shopping experience. Digital tools, such as expedited checkout, in-aisle kiosks for checking stock or product details, and smart fitting rooms equipped with tablets for complementary product suggestions, turn physical stores into immersive spaces. These tools not only boost engagement but also increase sales and operational efficiency.

Building stronger customer relationships: creating privileged interactions

Strengthening customer relationships has become a key priority for brands. Innovative communication methods, like leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) through chatbots, enable meaningful interactions with customers. Tools such as instant messaging, responsive after-sales service, and personalized newsletters all contribute to this goal.

Beyond these tools, valuing customer feedback is essential for continually refining product and service offerings. By listening closely to consumer needs and opinions, brands can foster loyalty and stay aligned with market expectations.

Sales techniques: empowering your teams

To deliver a personalized customer experience, sales associates should take on the role of personal shoppers, offering tailored support that aligns with each customer’s specific needs. Mobile checkout systems and in-store tablets are invaluable tools for streamlining transactions and providing real-time assistance throughout the shopping journey.

By leveraging customer knowledge, sales teams can adapt their approach and communication style, creating stronger, more personalized relationships with customers while enhancing their overall shopping experience.

Implementing your customer knowledge strategy 

Key steps for success

Every successful customer knowledge strategy begins by answering these questions: What information do you need about your customers? What channels are available for collecting this data? How can you analyze and use it effectively?

Here are the key steps to follow:

1. Data collection: gather information about your customers through in-store visits, online interactions, and social media.
2. Data analysis: analyze the data to uncover trends, preferences, and purchasing behaviors, helping you understand customer profiles and expectations.
3. Customer segmentation: divide your customer base into segments based on relevant criteria (age, gender, sports preferences, purchase history, etc.) for more targeted marketing and sales actions.
4. Personalized customer experience: use the collected insights to personalize every stage of the customer journey, both online and in-store.
5. Team training: train your sales teams on customer knowledge strategies and personalization techniques, empowering them to deliver unique customer service.
6. Monitoring and adjustment: regularly track the performance of your customer knowledge strategy and adjust it based on customer feedback and business outcomes. Stay agile to meet evolving customer needs.

Essential tools

To fully leverage customer knowledge in sports retail, you need the right tools for data collection, analysis, and centralization:

• Customer journey analysis tools: these track customer behavior throughout their shopping journey, providing valuable insights into their interactions, preferences, and habits.
• Centralized data systems: consolidating all collected data (purchases, interactions, preferences) into one system simplifies analysis and segmentation, enabling more effective marketing.
• POS software: advanced point-of-sale systems are essential for efficient in-store transactions. Integrating loyalty programs rewards regular customers and provides deeper insights into their purchasing behaviors.

Ultimately, the combination of these tools enables you to optimize and personalize the customer experience. A specialized ERP tailored for the sports retail sector can seamlessly integrate these tools into a single, cohesive system. This allows for comprehensive, personalized customer relationship management by combining customer data, journey analytics, loyalty programs, operational management, and many other essential features.