How customer data analysis can win loyalty through personalized shopping experiences.

By: Ryan Gibbons


The point of sale solution available to you through your retail merchant account provider can become your essential sidekick in the accomplishment of numerous tasks. Perhaps the most important of its features lies in its ability to collect, store, and leverage a host of datapoints. With the insights gained from customer details, you can enrich your relationships with buyers, keep them coming back, and inspire them to refer their social contacts to your store.

A goldmine of details.

Because your POS is integrated with your online payment processing company, it is a storehouse of actionable information about shoppers, particularly if they have given you their permission to access it. Once you have their okay, you can gather nuggets such as name, shopping history, contact details, milestones such as birthday, and even their hobbies and interests. With today’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI), your system can even use these details to make intelligent guesses about future purchases and craft and automate individualized promotions. We can’t think of a more compelling way to make people feel special.

Customer churn.

This refers to the rate at which buyers unsubscribe from a service or choose to no longer buy your products. Data analysis can help you to determine who left and why, enabling you to identify possible triggers that may have led to their disillusionment and defection. When you understand why people leave, you can aggressively work to improve the weaknesses in your product delivery and customer service infrastructure, helping to ensure that you retain as many valued buyers as possible.

Customer demographics.

Applying a microscope to your data will help you to learn who your customers are, including characteristics like age, geographic location, and perhaps even socioeconomic status. Drill down even further into your sales reports to learn which segment of your buyer base bought what products, and you can make accurate deductions about what parts of your strategy are working and which need refinement or sweeping changes.

Feedback.

Coming directly from buyers, feedback is your clearest barometer of what is working and where improvements need to be made. Each time someone posts a reaction or review and regardless of its tone, it represents a golden opportunity for you to respond, reward, recommend, and remedy. AI can even analyze language cues in your customers’ feedback to identify patterns that you can leverage to reply back in the ways they will appreciate most.

Examination of customer shopping behaviors.

With the data from your POS and insights suggested by AI, you can take stock of emerging patterns that show how customers interact with your company. For instance, look into how your most loyal patrons engage — via social media or primarily online — so that you can develop targeted retention strategies that capitalize on this intelligence.

Data about your customers and their shopping habits should become an essential catalyst for your future retention and marketing strategies. If you aren’t already leveraging these kernels of information to your benefit, don’t wait another day. Talk to your online payment processing provider to ensure that you have the POS equipment that can furnish you with a full array of buyer details, and you may soon see a boost in the ranks of your loyal customers.