Data is growing at an unprecedented rate. Last year 2.5 quintillion bytes were created every day. No doubt today’s figure would be substantially larger.

With these seemingly endless streams of data, you’d expect business would have no trouble providing the ultimate customer experience. Retailers should be at the forefront of this innovation. Increasingly, customers prefer to shop online and willingly share purchase history and demographic data with every transaction.

Despite the influx of data, getting the online experience right has proved frustratingly difficult. Poplin Data believes a lot of that has to do with the way retail businesses approach their data.

Too much data, not enough insights

Ask yourself how much time your data team spends collecting and managing data? Then ask yourself how much time they spend generating the businesses intelligence you actually wanted in the first place? For a data expert to spend most of their time either cleaning data or moving data around is crazy.

An internal disconnect exists amongst most retailers. There’s a certain department that runs offline and there’s a certain department that does online. Frustratingly, there’s not a lot of communication between them.

This is why Poplin views data as a communication stream and a shared service within a company — so that everyone has access to the data, the analysis, and the same systems.

The key to achieving this outcome is data governance, with our primary goal being clients’ peace of mind. Our solutions mean clients can be confident their data is not only optimised but collected and stored appropriately.

Getting the right systems and processes in place means staff in all parts of the business can monitor data easily. Not only does this highlight potential opportunities it also generates savings by alerting stakeholders to problems as they emerge.

Making “boring” data interesting

While data is powerful, for many the infrastructure around it is simply boring. This is exactly why Poplin exists: to take care of the “boring” for our clients. Data systems should be running seamlessly in the background so companies can get on with finding out what their customers want and how to provide it.

Poplin’s mission is to empower clients so they treat data as a source of insight, not an administrative burden. That means getting systems, technology and processes in place, right from the start, that ensure data is collected, shared and stored correctly.

Achieving this doesn’t necessarily mean new technology but getting more from tools that already exist. The focus is on people and the way they interact with insights, not the machines.

Online personalised service

What these insights allow for is the return to good old-fashioned, personalised customer service. The right data gives online retailers the opportunity to create an experience that is unique to every different digital visitor. In the competitive retail sector, this personalisation offers a major competitive advantage.

Creating a personalised experience means fundamentally understanding a company’s operating model. Poplin puts ourselves in your business, seeing firsthand how human interaction and formal processes affect your ability to use data, so we can build the most effective data solution.

We’ve achieved this with online marketplace Oneflare. Our solutions helped the team understand their customer data better and turned them into hardcore fans. Read the case study to find out more.

Author: Narbeh Yousefian

Poplin Data is based in Sydney and has worked with a number of retailers and digital-first businesses to get their data right including Catch.com.au, The Iconic, CarsGuide, Finder and more. They will be at Inside Retail 2020 – if you’d like to meet up – please get in contact here.