Growing Impact Of Social Intelligence In Retail

The retail industry has always been customer-centric. Every year, billions of dollars are invested in market research by retailers keen on learning customer preferences. As both customers and retailers have gone digital, the amount of data collected and processed has grown exponentially. With global sales exceeding $27 trillion in 2022, the industry’s focus has increased to data-backed decision-making and finding viable ways to generate business intelligence.

Amidst such a dynamic environment, social intelligence has emerged as an essential game-changer for retail brands that can capitalize on it. Here’s how that is happening.

What is Social Intelligence?

Social intelligence takes the data collected through social listening and runs it through big data analytics tools to generate business intelligence and strategic insights. 

The practice makes a retail brand aware of its market, competition, customer expectations, and how the brand is perceived.

With social intelligence, brands can help deep dive into the social sphere and determine how customers engage with their products. Every mention, comment, review, like, or share is analyzed at a macro level to model customer behavior and identify variables affecting brand performance.

Growing Impact of Social Intelligence In Retail

Both brick-and-mortar and eCommerce retailers are waking up to the importance of social listening and generating data-backed insights for strategic decision-making.

 Social intelligence, as a result, is having a tremendous impact on various functions and aspects of retail.

Customer Journey Mapping

Retailers have always attempted to understand the customer journey to develop their service output. While some of it can be captured through structured surveys and research, a more detailed customer journey can be mapped with the help of social intelligence.

Retailers can learn how customers discover their brand, which platforms and content formats shape their opinions when the customers choose to interact with the brand when the purchase decision is happening, and what factors are affecting it. 

An accurate journey map can be created with all the pieces in place, and quantifiable aspects of customer experience can be defined.

Customer Profiling

Retailers depend on precise market segmentation and targeting to position their brand, plan their assortment, and organize marketing efforts. But segmentation based on geographic, demographic, and psychographic variables still leaves a gap in understanding customer preferences, behavior, and affinity towards brand patronage. 

Social intelligence enables retail brands to develop more detailed profiles of their target customers. Based on the customers’ activity on social media, brand advocates, influencers, and detractors can be easily identified.

 At the same time, the bulk of the target market can be profiled based on their engagement with the brand and the business generated through them.

Strength and Weakness Analysis

Social Intelligence can not be generated through mere social listening. Retail brands have to engage their customers, resolve their problems, and act on their feedback. Such interactions and their results are then analyzed to derive social intelligence.

Brands can identify their core strengths, ranging from merchandise, variety, pricing, promotions, customer service, or brand positioning. At the same time, brands can also identify their weaknesses and pain points diminishing the customer experience. Future strategies can then be devised based on what can be done and what needs to be done.

Competitor and Opportunity Analysis

Social intelligence is not only for learning own strengths and weaknesses but also for understanding the market forces and the competitive scenario. Mentions and reviews of competitor brands can be analyzed to track customer sentiment and gaps in the competitors’ offerings. 

Emerging market trends can be identified to adjust existing offerings, innovate, and maintain competitive advantage. In the retail space, it can mean identifying new platform features such as virtual shopping assistants or augmented reality (AR), service add-ons for premium and high-ticket products, unique promotional campaigns, and assortment gaps.

In sum, the impact of social intelligence is growing in the retail sector as brands have started to invest in tools and services to generate insights from the voluminous data their consumer has generated. 

 Empowered with meaningful social insights, retailers learn to shape their offerings to meet customer expectations. In doing so, retailers are retaining their brand position and growing sustainably.

To read more about social intelligence and how related technology is shaping the retail sector, visit the Cogent Info website.

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