Gartner retail research findings indicate less than 10% of Tier 1 retailers believe they are highly effective at personalization and nearly one-third report having limited or no capability to support personalization efforts. So what does this mean for multichannel retailers? Gartner analyst Kelsie Welch and I are collaborating on an effort to highlight both the opportunity and the challenge that personalization represents. In this first installment, Kelsie describes some of the foundational issues that are impeding progress:
• Failure to standardize customer data
• Uncoordinated execution of personalization
• No linkages between CRM and merchandising systems
So what to do? While obtaining a single view of the customer is necessary to achieve personalization, portraying “one view of the retailer” in and across all channels is critical as well. In order to leverage personalization to improve customer experiences, retailers must focus on advancing customer segments by combining CRM, merchandising and contextual information as part of an organizational strategy to execute personalization. Success in multichannel retailing boils down to providing a seamless experience for customers. Gartner clients can read the research entitled Delivering on Personalization Requires Advanced Merchandise Segmentation and Consistent Communications for a more detailed analysis.
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1 Comment
Yes, the data in the CRM and merchandising systems needs to be combined. However, the personalization vendor can quickly and easily do this in the cloud rather than requiring an expensive integration of the two systems. Furthermore, the system should result in intelligent and automated 1-to-1 personalization rather than time consuming advanced but manual segmentation.