How do retail experts, themselves, want to be treated in stores?

How do retail experts, themselves, want to be treated in stores?

Ingrid Finnson
Ingrid Finnson,

As a leader in retail, you probably often ask yourself how you can use data to add more value to your customers while managing their data with care and integrity.

But as a private person, how do you feel about your own data, and what are you expecting from your own shopper experience?

During the conference Di Retail, Lars Frösslund from Cognizant spoke about some of our key learnings from working with global retail companies. The audience were mostly leaders in retail, so he also took the opportunity to conduct a small study with them about how they feel about their personal data being used by retail.

We got some pretty surprising answers. For example, did you know that:

  • Most leaders in retail prefer to get bonus points rather than personalized offers. But in working with retail companies globally we know that almost everybody is talking about how to personalize offers. Why this discrepancy, and what does it mean?
  • Less than a quarter are willing to share information such as size, length, weight, education or address. When not even retail experts themselves are not willing to share this, how much can we expect from customers? Why this unwillingness, how does it affect our ability to personalize, and what can we do about it?
  • Almost everybody (more than 80%) believe that we will be cashless in stores within the next 36 months. Is this too optimistic, or does it highlight that almost all large retail businesses are already on their way to become cashless? What can we do to use this trend to provide even more value?

See all answers and draw your own conclusions (note that the questions and answers are in Swedish)

Do you believe that these answers reflect the opinion of the general public, or do experts in retail have differing preferences since they work with these questions daily? How do you believe retail will use data in the future, and how well are you and your company positioned for the data driven shopper experience?

P.S. For those of you who have retail operations in Sweden: Read our large Swedish study of Swedish retail customers' preferences. It's packed with insights about what Swedes expect from their retail experience, the best pricing strategies, which loyalty-programs work best, and much more. Click below to read more about it:

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