Argos is the largest catalogue retailer in the UK to this day serving around 123 million customers per year with a product range of more than 43,000 items, the company was founded in 1972. Now as the world turns to the digital age, that’s what Argos anticipate and plan to change towards, that being digital stores.
Brandwatch Analytics have been employed on behalf of Argos to create a segment analysis to help the company to achieve a goal of opening 53 new digital stores across the UK. This goal has been created to compensate for the rise in demand in technology. In 2013 alone over 20 million people owned a tablet.
Brandwatch is a renowned leading social media listening and analysing platform. The idea is to use Brandwatch to help with feedback on the new digital store concept. Analysing the feedback is necessary because Argos has built such a large name as a catalogue store for over 40 years. Consumers do not allows like the idea of change. Any negative feedback is welcomed so the customer experience can improved and any positive feedback can help the company learn to what works and what doesn’t.
The technique of understanding the customers will be natural language processing. The use of social media will aid in achieving the goals of the company. The idea is that certain categories will be used to split the target market up to aid the store managers regionally. Twitter is used to address the difference in opinions between demographic, gender and age. The demographic split of feedback is important to be relevant to each individual store. The use of twitter is to ensure that fast response can be acted appropriately between each individual store, store managers can act accordingly.
The data made many conclusions, males showed a positive reaction in the change to towards a digital store and females made more of positive reaction towards the change in customers service. The data also concluded that the digital stores were most popular in London. The article below shows the relevance that London is the tech capital of Europe. (see link below)
http://www.thecreativeindustries.co.uk/uk-creative-overview/news-and-views/news-london-confirmed-as-europes-tech-capital
The research did however conclude that some customers did prefer a traditional shopping experience, therefore going to Argos for their original tended purpose of ordering products out of product. Argos has taken the data as an advantage to adjust to what customers want to experience.
We are still yet to see what Argos has in store for future goals but keeping up with the digital era is an exciting manifesto.