Today, retailers are mining droves of information to better understand shoppers, in order to provide tailored user experiences — which consumers are increasingly demanding.
Customers want to have more personalized shopping experiences and will reward those retailers that hit the mark with their loyalty.
And loyalty drives revenue: Research agency TNS Global has found that 69% of shoppers buy a brand repeatedly. So, providing the right brand at the right time and place consistently is a winning formula. However, the formula is sometimes tough to create.
Walmart is an excellent example of the importance of data collection and business analytics.
The retail giant collects 2.5 petabytes of unstructured data from 1 million customers every hour. Walmart began its journey to understand its customers more thoroughly back in 2012, when it moved from a 10-node Hadoop cluster to a 250-node Hadoop cluster.
Through analytics, seemingly disparate pieces of information are brought together to draw conclusions that might otherwise go unnoticed.
