Survey: Understanding customers key to holiday sales

Santa Cruz, Calif. - Sixty-six percent of retailers attending the recent Big Data & Analytics for Retail Summit believe the number one way to ensure a successful holiday season is to understand customer behavior to drive sales and build loyalty. Moreover, data from business analytics provider Looker shows that four-in-10 retailers feel they are still ineffective when it comes to using data to improve business performance.



The Looker poll also revealed retailers’ top challenges with business intelligence include ad hoc report requests that take up the majority of analysts’ time (34%). Other challenges include the inability to collaborate across the business to uncover data insights (31%), disjointed data that hinders decision-making (31%) and standardized reports that don’t allow the full analysis of data (16%).



The Looker retail poll also uncovered retailers’ holiday business intelligence wish lists. At the top of the list were the ability to experiment with new data models without requiring new hardware, software or additional resources (25%) and a platform that allows staff to have access to explore the data they need to make their own decisions (22%). Other requests were the ability to provide top customer service by quickly responding to customer issues and complaints (16%) and speeding up their current analytics process (16%).