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Walmart ‘listening to customer’

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NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — At Walmart, the customer is the boss and the key to the retailer’s success, senior vice president of global consumer insights and analytics Matt Kistler told attendees at last month’s IRI Growth Summit 2016 here.

“The size and scale of Walmart means that we serve a lot of customers, and 260 million transactions a week. I’m always amazed that people think Walmart doesn’t serve everyone. Across all demographics — household size, ethnicity, income, generational — if you look at the Walmart customer, it lines up exactly with the rest of America,” Kistler said in his keynote address. “So we really are a proxy for America. If you are selling to us, if you are providing services to us, don’t think that we aren’t serving all of America. Because we really are. And the statistics show it.”

Walmart is the largest surveyor of customer information in the United States, he noted. The company surveys tens of thousands of customers each week to know what they are saying about their in-store experiences.

“We’re listening to the customer, what they want and what they value,” he said.

The surveys are part of a massive effort by Walmart to gather and analyze data that can help the company “deliver a seamless, connected customer experience, at a very large scale,” according to Kistler.

“We’re offering the customer the ability to shop wherever, however, whenever they want to and, more importantly, in our stores, online or with mobile,” he said.

Kistler leads a global consumer insights and analytics team spread among Walmart offices in Bentonville, Ark.; San Bruno, Calif.; and elsewhere. The team is a “forward-looking mechanism for the company,” he explained. “We serve all of Walmart, whether it be dot-com, marketing, merchandising or operations, to really break out those customer insights and amplify the voice within the departments. The goal is to bring actionable insights and, hopefully, drive growth.

“As [Walmart U.S. president and chief executive officer] Greg Foran likes to say, you get one point for talking about it and nine points for getting it done. And as [company founder] Sam Walton said, ‘For Walmart to grow, we know we must get more customer obsessed than we already are.’ ”

Because of social media and smartphones, it’s probably easier for Walmart to know its customers today than it was in Sam Walton’s heyday.

Consider Generation Z, the tech-savvy individuals roughly 20 years old and younger, and the vast amount of information about themselves they routinely disseminate via messaging apps and other social media, Kistler suggested. “Twenty million photos a month are published on Snapchat. A lot of things are up there. It’s possible to understand a lot about the customer, and the pace is only going to accelerate.”

Walmart tracks 100 social media sites in order to stay abreast of trends and to monitor consumer sentiment, Kistler noted. Often the activity yields actionable information, as when Walmart is able to follow the spread of allergies or the flu across the United States and then use the insight to make sure its stores and pharmacies are prepared for increased demand for relevant products and services.

Good retailing increasingly is a data-driven activity, Kistler pointed out. “There are four key things the customer uses to select a retailer. The first is access, or how convenient the retailer is to get to, to shop, to navigate. The second is the assortment that the retailer provides. The third is price, and the fourth is the experience. Knowing this helps with our decisions on formats, our online site and departments throughout the store. We have the information on all of these.”

Walmart’s immense scale gives its data a lot of weight. The company is the world’s largest retailer, with 11,500 stores in 28 countries and sales of $482 billion last year, about 8% more than No. 2 Sinopec Group, China’s state-owned energy and chemicals company. In addition, Walmart is the world’s largest private employer, with 2.2 million employees, 1.4 million of whom work in the United States. Only the U.S. Department of Defense and the Chinese army employ more people.

And few if any enterprises collect and analyze more data than Walmart. “We think in terms of petabytes [a unit of digital information equal to one quadrillion bytes],” Kistler said. “We play in the range of 25 to 30 petabytes. One petabyte is — think of your favorite song playing continuously for about 2,000 years. So it’s really amazing what’s available today and what we can pull from. But more importantly, what we can do with it.”


ECRM_06-01-22


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