Analyze What Your Shoppers Say and Do

Listening to your customers and watching what they do is essential. But you also need to analyze what you find out and do that analysis using insights about your specific business and your specific shoppers.
     Asking questions of shoppers and then recording what they answer—as is done in consumer survey questionnaires—provides one kind of data. However, the answers you get can be incomplete or misleading. People often don’t know why they’re doing what they do. They shop in certain ways for reasons you can discover, but those reasons are often operating at a subconscious level. Even when shoppers know their reasons, they may not want to tell you. It gets even worse when your objective is to predict what your customers and potential customers will be doing next. And that is the rightful objective of business analytics. You don’t want to spend too much time looking in the rear view mirror.
     So don’t just ask. Watch and listen. Have your sales staff make notes on what they hear shoppers saying to the sales staff and to each other about your products, services, store appearance, and the rest. Watch and listen online. Retailers have access not just to what is said and done in the store, but also what is said and done about the store via internet postings.
     Then continually analyze so you turn data into information with implications for action. Understand the verbal and nonverbal language of your shoppers. Check that your interpretations of the words and actions match what the shoppers intend.

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers