Reinventing the Brand Experience with Sigma

Customer and brand experiences are no longer just “icing on top of the cake” instead, it is imperative that a company creates an experience that is memorable and seamless across all touchpoints. If your company has not invested in the brand experience then it is missing out on the opportunity to create customer loyalty and improve how much each customer spends on your products. 

Why the Brand Experience is Important 

Every business is forever chasing brand loyalty from its customers. And this loyalty comes back to one key driver: the customer experience.  Forbes states “With clearer measurement of their customer experience against competitors, organizations will have no choice but to fundamentally shift strategies from just meeting inbound service needs to proactively orchestrating great experiences.” which shows that companies are very aware of how differentiating a great customer experience can be for their brand. In the last three to four years, consumers have pushed to make sure that brands are held accountable for sustainability and political issues. They expect a great shopping experience with their brand from start to finish.  

Empathize with your Customers

Consumers are forcing companies to pay attention to not only their wants and needs for products but also their needs for a complete omnichannel experience. This pressure over the last few years has cauased top retail and CPG companies like Nike, PepsiCo, and the NBA to double down on their initiatives to understand the customer; their journey, their experience, and their wants and needs more than ever before. However, in order to successfully do this, companies must be able to use all relevant data to make customer 360s, improve customer loyalty programs, and improve the shipping experience. This has proven to be easier said than done because of the millions of rows of data that live in systems such as CRMs, and ERPs. This isn’t even considering other tools like Nielsen, POS systems, and payment systems! Instead of being able to utilize all available data from your systems, you are pulling exports, summarized reports, and other snapshots to build out improved customer experiences and not see the ROI that you want. 

The problem is that this approach only takes you so far.  For example, let’s say that you are a retail or CPG company that has the initiative to increase market penetration with Gen Z and other target demographics. An analyst would begin to gather the sales and product data along with external consumer insights for each demographic that you are targeting. The issue with this approach is that the analyst would have a fragmented view of the customer unless they know how to code since there are multiple datasets from different applications and systems that would need to be joined in order to gather insights. Even if they are able to write code it can take weeks to get the report that you’re looking for, and as a business user, that information can be stale and hard to make concrete decisions with. 

So what’s the better approach to improving customer experience? Meet Sigma for Retail. 

How Sigma Helps 

Sigma is an exploratory analytics platform that connects to your cloud data warehouse in minutes. Its familiar spreadsheet-like user interface breaks down data silos across your organization, enabling your teams to unlock the power of their data and align their decision-making. This helps your Retail and CPG organization make decisions quicker, with more accuracy and control than you’ve had before. For example, you could pull regional sales data this month and compare it with last month in seconds. You could do the same thing with a product that’s just launched, or one that you’re thinking of retiring. Sigma’s near-unlimited scale allows your retail and CPG team to do root cause analysis, drill into a specific store’s data, and even combine all data sets from ALL systems so that you can create a true customer 360. 

Take retailer Veronica Beard, for example.

The fashion apparel brand has 15 stores and its own eCommerce site, with the goal of expanding its direct-to-consumer approach. Before Sigma, only a couple of people at the company had the ability to write SQL and actually analyze data on things like which segment of customers bought certain items, or how certain stores and regions were performing. 

Sigma helped Veronica Beard collate all of their data together so that they could create rich customer 360s. This resulted in a 25% increase in email marketing ROI, a 20% reduction in customer acquisition cost, and an 11% increase in return on ad spend. Improving the customer experience is no small task and it takes a lot of accurate data to turn ideas into results. Read more about the Veronica Beard case study here.