Amongst retailers, tech corporations and moderators at Shoptalk in Las Vegas in 2024, artificial intelligence (AI) endured as a typical thread throughout Monday’s programming. At certainly one of the last panels of the day, which focused on AI and personalization, the conversation turned to certainly one of the elemental layers of AI strategy: data best practices.
On the panel, speakers from DoorDash, Kendra Scott and Alimentation Couche-Tard swapped stories about what they’ve achieved. In doing so, they offered suggestions for setting teams up for achievement when merchants begin leveraging data to tackle personalization.
Data best practices for setting a foundation
Simply because data is already there doesn’t necessarily mean that an organization is able to begin using that data to start a personalization project, suggested Kamanasish Kundu, vp, head of digital and ecommerce, for Kendra Scott. Chatting with the audience, the panelists each shared their very own priorities and decisions to contemplate rigorously early on.
“When I joined Kendra Scott in January 2023 last yr, I feel certainly one of the largest challenges was data,” Kundu said. “We didn’t have enough confidence by way of the information integrity.”
For Kundu, that presented an issue for the jewellery seller.
“Typically, that’s the muse of any testing and personalization program,” Kundu explained. “So fast forward six months, we accomplished our data cleansing and brought within the experts. And we created a full–funnel view, identified or pinpointed all of the friction points within the journey, and that became the foundation of our testing and personalization program.”
Kendra Scott is No. 670 in Top 1000 Database, where Digital Commerce 360 categorizes it as a jewellery retailer. The database ranks North America’s leading online retailers by their annual web sales.
Protecting data
Meanwhile, Kevin Lewis, chief growth officer at Alimentation Couche-Tard, the parent company of Circle K, gave some advice for retaining ownership of company data, even when a partner or vendor presents a tempting offer.
“There’s gonna be a time when someone goes to say, ‘Hey, give us your consumer data and we’re completely satisfied to pay for stuff,’” Lewis said. “For those of you who will not be of the dimensions and scale, that’s a tempting trade-off: ‘Help us fund the long run by selling the buyer stuff.’ I’ll let you know, I feel that’s a false trade-off.”
What Lewis proposed as an alternative was valuing that data as a part of what makes an organization competitive and safeguarding it accordingly.
“I’m pretty clear that anybody can construct a store and anybody can load it with the stuff that we sell,” he stated. “But at the top of the day, there’s probably two things that may make us unique and differentiated. One, I imagine, is our culture, and we’re not going to sell that. Two — over time — goes to be the information we now have that permits us to do things that nobody else can.”
The consequence, he posed, might be giving one other company what it needs down the road to duplicate what another person has achieved.
Data best practices for creating value
Jessica Lachs, vp of analytics and data science at DoorDash, echoed Lewis’s sentiments. She noted her own perspective on demonstrating data’s value by prioritizing business impact.
“Data is on the core of every part we do at DoorDash and is why I like my job a lot,” Lachs said. “We measure every part we possibly can, and I feel that that’s a method you’ll be able to make a very great case for investing in the information, which is to indicate that once you do, you see real business impact that you’ll be able to quantify and that may enable you make a few of these trade-offs.”
At DoorDash, which will involve A/B tests, switchback tests or what Lachs calls “quasi-experimental methods to find a way to size the impact of product features.” DoorDash handles a whole bunch of hundreds of SKUs on its app.
Ultimately, she considers this approach a differentiator for the corporate.
“I think that that’s something that’s really unique to us and something that is a competitive advantage for us,” Lachs said.
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