Enhancing Retail Customer Loyalty with Efficient Data Storage

[george_hope]

Consumers today have more shopping choices than ever before. With just the stroke of a few keys, consumers can make purchases from any retailer in the world. Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are working tirelessly to reach maximum productivity, despite the speed and performance limitations posed by strict budgets, manpower restrictions, and limited IT expertise. For these SMB retailers, implementing the right small business IT solutions is key to improving data storage management capabilities and satisfying evolving industry demands. How can an SMB retailer compete? The answer is effective data management.

INVESTING IN EFFECTIVE DATA STORAGE SOLUTIONS

When retailers use data properly, they have the opportunity to learn about individual customer preferences, and tailor their products to growing consumer segments. SMB retailers utilize a variety of data types to improve the shopping experience—including customer, transactional, and historical data. By implementing location analytics to send geo-targeted notifications to consumer’s mobile devices, retailers can create customized, one-to-one promotional offers and incentives. Retailers can also gather data on customer’s in-store experience by tracking and analyzing when the customer enters the store, the route the customer takes in the store, how long the customer stays, and how frequently they visit. This in-store data enhances the overall customer experience as retailers can better understand the consumer and their buying behaviors, enabling them to target the location of a promotion or a product’s placement within the store.

SMBs who understand and value data-driven insights into their customer’s preferences should be utilizing high-speed data storage. SMBs need high-performance storage capabilities that are affordable and extremely fast to make offers and promotions to consumers while they are shopping. This is critical to competing against larger retailers and ensuring a personalized and convenient customer experience. Scalable storage is especially important for SMB retailers who face seasonal shifts in demand and need storage solutions that will accommodate growth. Beneficial business insights are dependent upon gathering, storing, and analyzing data in real time. Storage capacity and performance both need to be optimized to achieve these results.

PREPARING RETAILERS FOR THE FUTURE

Just as customers are constantly evolving their shopping behaviors, retailers must strive to constantly enhance the shopping experience and deliver more informed, personalized products and services. Thus, SMB retailers must invest in solutions that allow them to rapidly store and access data in order to accelerate data-driven decisions about their customers and evolve into a more customer-centric business.

For retailers who are striving to grow their businesses, Nimble Storage, an acquisition of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), combines predictive analytics to identify and resolve problems before they occur with unmatched flash performance, scalability, and 99.9999% availability. HPE Modular Smart Array (MSA) storage is another solution that is transforming retail SMBs’ data processing capabilities. An SMB needs powerful data services and the HPE Modular Smart Array (MSA) 2050 storage is a flexible, virtualized array system architecture that can be customized for the retailer’s needs reducing application response times, operating costs and power consumer. The new HPE MSA 2050 storage delivers 2x higher performance than the previous generation (at the same price) while keeping your business up and running with expanded data protection features.

To learn more about how HPE storage solutions can facilitate your retail SMB’s data needs follow us on Twitter at @HPE_SMB.

George Hope
VP Worldwide Small and Medium Business,
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

 @HPE_SMB
 gehope