On November 15, 2023, 60% of Spanish retail companies struggle to understand their customers well due to the increasingly individualized, heterogeneous, and changing preferences and habits of the new consumer, according to the conclusions of the 4th edition of the study "Retail Barometer 2023 – 2024: Towards Intelligent Retail," conducted by Esade, with the support of the technology consulting firm SEIDOR and the collaboration of the communication consulting firm ATREVIA, through a survey of 250 manufacturers, distributors, and individuals working in wholesale and retail companies.
Moreover, in the face of these heterogeneous customer characteristics, influenced by multiple factors such as the variability of habits, values, behaviors, attitudes, or references, as well as a fragmentation of channels and points of contact, only 40% of retailers have defined the customer journey in their physical and digital sales channels.
Thus, despite retailers sharing the belief that understanding customer behavior in the store is necessary to design their customer experience strategy, the report suggests that a majority is unaware of this information, a figure that also worsens the results from the 2022 barometer.
This difficulty in identifying a typical buying path poses the need for retailers to have a better understanding of the individuality of each customer to, in turn, create personalized proposals. In this regard, the study also highlights the trend among retailers to pay special attention to key elements such as the use of automation tools to reduce customer journey frictions and the implementation of intelligent prediction and personalization models.
Overall, for the Spanish retailer, the main competitive utility of technology is its contribution to customer knowledge (32%), followed by process efficiency (29%), and productivity (26%).