Fuelled by the growth of ecommerce due to the pandemic, retail experiences are no longer driven solely by products or in-store customer service. Now, there is greater value in providing enhanced and personalised customer experiences no matter where or at what stage a customer may engage with a retailer.
Today, ecommerce is the fastest growing channel of the retail market in Europe, with online sales in Western Europe alone (UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Italy, and Spain) reaching £347.65bn in 2021, a massive growth of 128% since 2015. The pandemic most notably has been a huge contributing factor in altering society and fuelling new consumer trends and habits, largely through the concept of homebound consumers.
With a large number of the workforce operating from home, retailers have had to adjust their customer value proposition. These include more health-conscious people, purchasing from more sustainable brands fuelled by Gen Z, and the need for super quick access and delivery of products from retail to home to the ever-growing demand for Q-Commerce—quick commerce emphasising fast deliveries, typically in less than an hour. To tap into these trends and ensure retailers are catering to customers, homebound or not, they must effectively harness near real-time data and automation to drive faster, more informed insights. For Sainsbury’s, having access to real-time insights has enabled their teams to deliver the right mix of products, services, and loyalty program offers to their customers.
Data platforms are enabling retailers to rapidly deploy and scale an integrated source of truth to consolidate data on inventory, product sales, customer segments, and behaviour. Centralising all of this data has allowed Monoprix to share product sales with their partners and service providers in a matter of minutes. Prior to Snowflake, this took Monoprix 15 days to prepare the data and send thousands of files to their providers.
Through Snowflake’s Data Cloud, the retail and CPG sector can have a holistic view of all their data in one single platform. From in-store checkouts to online purchases, data can be processed in near real time and supported with data science capabilities to drive automated and predictive data modelling. For Żabka this meant predicting where to open the next convenience store. Historically, Żabka scouted new locations by counting the number of pedestrians passing by and correlating that to the number of nearby residents. Today with Snowflake Data Cloud, Żabka uses data from all their existing stores as well as hundreds of external data sources. There are 8.5 million addresses in Poland, and Żabka has developed revenue estimation models that estimate how the company can most effectively open new locations to serve the population, accelerating their expansion by 40% while reducing errors by 70%.
To learn more about how retail and CPG organisations can mobilise, centralise, and capitalise on their data, visit Snowflake at the World Retail Congress in Rome on 4-5 April. Alternatively, if you’d like to learn how leading Polish grocer Żabka is collaborating with their strategic CPG partners to drive efficiencies throughout the supply chain, minimise revenue loss, and improve profitability, join us virtually on 21 April.