Building a happy shopper
Alex McCulloch, Director at CACI, looks at how data can be used to help the property world better understand their customers.
First published in Retail Destination on 7 July 2022
There is a well-worn mantra in retail that the customer is always right, and like all cliches it is grounded in a kernel of truth. At the heart of success in retail is engaging consumers, through capturing their attention, their wallets and their loyalty. This is as equally true of shopping centres as it is of shops.
A successful shopping centre is one with high levels of occupancy, strong footfall, rental growth and renewals, engaged car park revenue, and high customer satisfaction. The root driver of all of these is a happy occupier, and a happy occupier is one who has happy shoppers.
The key questions for quantifying this have not fundamentally changed over the years: Who is my customer? Where are they coming from? What are they doing when they visit? What do they think? These need to be known to support leasing, marketing, centres operations and also development and investment.
For many years the way to measure this was using a disparate set of centre data such as car park usage, footfall counters, patchy turnover data and anecdotal feedback from store managers – supplementing these with annual exit surveys or focus groups. Collectively with this data we can get footfall counting, dwell, frequency, average transaction value, conversion, Net Promoter Score and satisfaction ratings.
The challenge is that using exit surveys to capture the core KPIs on shopper engagement (spend, frequency, dwell, satisfaction) is limited as a snapshot in time – a single off-peak fortnight in a year. However, as consumers we are always ‘on’, and even more so post-Covid, and the data world has evolved to reflect this, in particular the rise of two key datasets: mobile geolocation data and transactional spend data.
Used in tandem with CACI geodemographic data, we can provide larger samples, the same core KPIs (and often more insight) and crucially constant monitoring over time – and it is all GDPR compliant.
· Mobile geolocation data is derived from the GPS in your phone when it uses location services, this pushes the device’s location, allowing us to understand who is in the location, where they have come from and what they have done in centre, all time stamped to the hour throughout the year.
· Transactional spend data helps us fill in the spend gaps. Working with a partner who manages packaged accounts (any current account with benefits) for a number of high street banks we see billions of transactions per year, across all occupiers both on and offline. This answers the ATV, what they spend and store engagement.
· In turn, this allows us to use exit surveys as a 1,000-strong focus group, asking open-ended questions to shoppers in the centre, drilling into the why that underpins all of the data. This generates huge insight into customer motivations and using our AI/ML models we can objectively analyse the open-ended comments.
Which adds up to a lot of numbers and information. But the thing about data is that the more of it you have, the more context and skill you need to understand what it is saying. This is why at CACI we put as much time on benchmarking and contextualising every asset we work on – so when you compare your actual performance to your expected performance you know where you have done well, and where the opportunity is.
All of which sets us up in a hugely exciting new world. Better quality, more insightful data with context served to our clients via hosted dynamic dashboards on a daily basis supplemented by consultant expertise.
It means our clients can access a new-live 360 degrees view of their assets, on the move, from the centre, from head offices and partner agencies to understand marketing ROI, leasing next steps, growth opportunity, turnover and OCR and most importantly of all – how happy your shopper is.