Customer Knowledge: How to Boost Your Retail Sales

In a fast-changing market where consumer expectations are constantly evolving, retail businesses need to stand out by offering a personalized customer experience. The key to achieving this lies in customer insights. Knowing who your customers are, what they’re looking for, and how they engage with your brand can make a significant impact on your sales and customer loyalty.

How can customer insights help you personalize 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 this help you increase your operational margins? This article answers all your questions.

1. Understanding Customer Data

Why Is Customer Knowledge Important?

In retail, customer knowledge means having a deep understanding of your store’s customers—their needs, preferences, shopping behaviors, and how they interact with your brand. This knowledge is crucial for personalizing the customer experience, anticipating expectations, and offering products and services that align with market trends.

Customer knowledge plays a critical role in growing your sales for several reasons:

• Personalizing the customer experience: Understanding your customers’ needs and preferences allows you to tailor your offerings and provide products or services that meet their specific expectations. This boosts customer loyalty and satisfaction.
• Optimizing marketing strategies: Knowing consumer buying behaviors allows you to create targeted and effective marketing strategies to attract and retain customers. Customer knowledge enables better market segmentation and helps deliver impactful, personalized messages.
• Improving customer relationships: By actively listening to and understanding your customers, you enhance service quality, anticipate potential problems, and provide tailored solutions. This helps to build a strong, trust-based relationship with your customers.

Analyzing Customer Data

Customer insights rely on collecting and analyzing several key types of data:

• Transactional data: Purchase history, average basket size, purchase frequency, etc.
• Behavioral data: Interactions across different sales channels (in-store, online, mobile), purchase journey, etc.
• Demographic data: Age, gender, geographic location, etc.
• Customer feedback: Reviews, comments, complaints, etc.
• Loyalty program data: Points earned, benefits used, wishlists, and more.

Customer data is a real goldmine. It allows you to personalize the customer experience by adjusting your offerings to match each customer’s unique preferences and needs. For example, you could recommend products based on their favorite sports activities. Additionally, this data is critical for optimizing your product assortment by analyzing purchasing behaviors to adjust your stock based on market trends and customer demands.

It also helps improve stock management by anticipating demand and adjusting inventory levels according to customer forecasts. Finally, segmenting customers based on demographic, behavioral, or geographic criteria enables retailers to better target their marketing efforts and offer personalized deals to each segment, enhancing customer loyalty.

2. Enhancing the Retail Customer Experience

Multichannel Journeys: Combining Online and Offline

In today’s digital world, hybrid shopping journeys have become a reality that retailers cannot ignore. Currently, 52% of French consumers mix online and offline shopping, and 44% practice ROPO (Research Online, Purchase Offline), meaning they research products online before heading to a store to make their purchase.

It’s no surprise, given that store-to-web, web-to-store, or click-and-collect practices provide a seamless and personalized experience. Shoppers can discover products in-store, reserve or complete purchases online, and collect them in-store. These blended shopping experiences offer flexibility and meet evolving customer expectations.

Omnichannel: A Unified and Seamless Experience

Omnichannel strategies and unified commerce are key to delivering a consistent and fluid customer experience across all sales channels in sports retail. By integrating various touchpoints—physical stores, websites, mobile apps, and social media—brands can offer a personalized, omnichannel experience, enabling customers to move effortlessly between channels.

At the heart of this approach is unified commerce, which centralizes customer data and inventory, providing real-time visibility across all channels. This integration streamlines purchasing, delivery, and return processes. By adopting a unified omnichannel strategy, sports retailers can improve customer satisfaction, enhance loyalty through personalized shopping journeys, and optimize commercial performance.

Phygital: Reducing In-Store Friction

The growth of phygital strategies in sports retail helps eliminate friction in-store by blending physical and digital elements to provide a personalized customer experience. Digital integration—such as faster checkout processes, in-aisle kiosks for stock and product information, or fitting rooms with tablets offering complementary product suggestions—transforms stores into true experience centers for consumers. These in-store digital tools boost customer engagement, increase sales, and improve operational efficiency.

Customer Relationships: Creating Personalized Interactions

Improving customer relationships is now a major focus for brands. To succeed, it’s important to implement innovative communication methods, especially by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots to create personalized interactions with customers. Instant messaging, responsive after-sales service, and personalized newsletters can all enhance the customer experience.

Beyond these tools, it’s crucial to value customer feedback to continuously adapt and improve the product and service offering. By listening carefully to customer needs and feedback, brands can build stronger loyalty and stay aligned with market expectations.

Sales Techniques: Engaging Your Teams

To truly personalize the customer experience, sales teams must evolve into personal shoppers, offering customized services that meet the specific needs of each customer. From mobile checkout solutions to in-store sales tablets, the goal is to facilitate transactions and provide continuous support throughout the shopping journey. Tailoring sales pitches based on customer knowledge also helps build stronger, more personalized relationships with shoppers.

3. Implementing Your Customer Knowledge Strategy

Steps to Build Your Strategy

A successful customer knowledge strategy starts by answering key questions: What information do you need about your customers? What channels do you have to collect this data? How will you analyze and use it effectively?

Here are the steps to follow:

• Data collection: Start by gathering data on your customers through in-store interactions, online channels, or social media.
• Data analysis: Once you’ve collected the data, analyze it to identify trends, preferences, and purchasing behaviors. This will help you understand customer profiles and expectations more clearly.
• Customer segmentation: Group your customer base into segments based on relevant criteria (age, gender, sports preferences, purchase history, etc.). This allows you to personalize your marketing and sales efforts for each segment.
• Personalizing the customer experience: Use the information collected to tailor the customer experience at every stage of the shopping journey, both online and in-store.
• Training your teams: Train your sales teams on customer knowledge strategies and personalization techniques. Encourage them to use this information to deliver unique customer service and foster loyalty.
• Measuring and adjusting: Regularly monitor the results of your customer knowledge strategy and adjust it based on customer feedback and business performance. Stay flexible and responsive to meet evolving customer needs.

Essential Tools

To fully leverage customer knowledge in sports retail, you need the right tools to collect, analyze, and centralize customer data.

• Customer journey analysis: To track customer behavior throughout their shopping journey, both online and in-store. This data provides valuable insights into customer interactions, preferences, and buying habits.
• Data centralization: To get a complete view of your customers, it’s essential to centralize all collected data (purchases, interactions, preferences, etc.) into one system. This makes it easier to analyze and segment customers for more effective marketing.
• POS software: Efficient point-of-sale (POS) software is critical for managing in-store transactions. Integrating a loyalty program into your POS system allows you to reward repeat customers and collect additional data on their buying habits.

Ultimately, it’s the combination of these tools that enables you to optimize and personalize the customer experience. An industry-specific ERP system tailored to sports retail can integrate all these tools into a single, cohesive platform. It provides comprehensive customer relationship management by bringing together customer data, journey tracking, loyalty programs, commercial operations, and many other essential features.