The New KPIs Call For Collaborative Approach From Tech Companies

Instant gratification is what retail and hospitality customers are increasingly seeking when it comes to making a purchase decision.

From Tommy Hilfiger (the man) to Amazon (the company), and many in between, those in consumer-facing industries have spoken recently about dealing with consumers that either want rapid delivery, food on the go, quick answers to queries on social media, or stores without queues.

For that reason, retailers need to be on top of their game at every given opportunity to avoid potential customers ditching them for a competitor, or seeking entertainment and hospitality elsewhere. A myriad of options are just a swipe of a mobile screen away, enabling consumers to lose patience very quickly or act more spontaneously in their purchasing decisions than in years gone by.

Retailers, restaurants and other hospitality companies are having to rewrite their rulebooks based on this new customer behaviour, and it’s resulting in them setting new key performance indicators (KPIs) for the instant gratification age. And to monitor these new KPIs, retail data analytics are crucial.

What Are Retailers and Restauranteurs’ New KPIs?

I’ve blogged in the recent past about the need to quash the queue in retail, and the same surely goes for hospitality where the thought of having a long wait to be seated flies in the face of the fast-food culture we’re all getting used to.

Speed of service is increasingly viewed by customers as a performance metric they care about, so retailers and hospitality firms need to be measuring their own ability in this area.

We know from our in-depth consumer research spanning nine countries, which was released at the start of 2018, that one thing all nations’ shoppers do tend to have in common is the notion that a good in-store shopping depends on convenience and quick service. These are the types of things organisations need to be monitoring to gauge their success in today’s environment.

Throw in qualities such as agility, customer care, and good product and appropriate pricing, and there’s five KPIs to help fuel sales growth, which in itself is the Holy Grail KPI.

Help Us, Help Them

We’re on the lookout for value-added resellers to support us in helping retailers and hospitality companies score highly in these areas. At iVend Retail we have the retail analytics technology that can inform businesses whether they are meeting their goals, and we think its a compelling proposition.

In the restaurant space, for example, our solution allows businesses to efficiently book guest reservations and send table notifications to queued customers – if customers are made to wait, you can be sure they’ll want clarity over when their table will be ready.

At the coalface on the shop floor in retail, our business intelligence solutions allow staff to understand instantly what stock is available across the wider enterprise. If it’s not in store and the customer is demanding to know why that’s the case, our retailers can show agility and pace to get the item distributed to the shopper from a single pool of stock.

The iVend Retail suite of retail and hospitality management solutions is varied, but the data and analytics tools that sit at the heart of it can help organisations make sense of – and ultimately achieve – their new targets. Resellers should get in touch with me and the team to see how we can spread the word further.

Selling into retail? Check out our data and analytics solutions that form part of a comprehensive retail and hospitality management technology suite