In today’s fiercely competitive retail environment, brands are challenged to go beyond simply offering products. They must deliver connected, relevant experiences that foster loyalty and drive sustainable growth. The recent webinar, Driving Retail Growth: Real-time Personalization & Journeys with CI360, brought together experts from Kyanon Digital and SAS to explore how advanced customer intelligence empowers retailers to transform data into action – ultimately unlocking measurable business value.
Featuring Mr. Mohamed Shakeer Anver, Senior Business Solutions Manager at SAS, the session examined how retailers can leverage real-time personalization to enhance engagement, improve conversion rates, and create seamless omnichannel journeys that customers expect in the experience economy.
- Real-time personalization is essential for modern retailers to deliver relevant, connected experiences across the customer journey.
- SAS Customer Intelligence 360 (CI360) helps businesses combine data, make automatic decisions, and engage customers across different channels using six main features: Plan, Listen, Understand, Decide, Act, and Measure.
- With CI360, brands can track customer experience, operational, and financial KPIs – turning strategy into measurable outcomes.
- A single customer view supports dynamic segmentation and personalized interactions that drive loyalty and long-term growth.
Retail’s new imperative: Experience over products
Retailers are increasingly functioning in an experience economy, where customers anticipate personalized, relevant, and seamless interactions across various channels. A unified approach that integrates real-time personalization into the customer journey enables brands to anticipate needs and respond with tailored offers and content.
Creating harmonic interactions across in-store, mobile, social, and digital channels is critical to improving conversion rates and sustaining loyalty. SAS Customer Intelligence 360 supports this shift by turning diverse customer data sources into actionable insights, helping organizations deliver experiences that differentiate and build long-term relationships.
Trends and challenges shaping customer experience in retail
Key trends driving customer experience transformation
The evolution of customer experience is influenced by several significant trends:
- Omnichannel journeys as standard: As digital and physical touchpoints converge, customers demand seamless, connected experiences – whether in-store, on mobile apps, social platforms, or email.
- Dynamic personalization at scale: Tailored content, offers, and messaging must adjust in real time based on behaviors and context to remain relevant and effective.
- Broader adoption of artificial intelligence capabilities, extending beyond generative AI to include machine learning models, AI-powered chatbots, and predictive analytics.
Common challenges hindering customer experience success
While the opportunities are compelling, retailers face a complex set of operational and technical challenges that can impede progress:
- Data accuracy and real-time insights: Many organizations lack fresh, actionable insights to inform effective decisions and create timely interactions.
- Identity resolution: Determining exactly who is engaging across channels remains a persistent obstacle to personalization and targeting.
- Sophisticated analytics activation: Deploying predictive models and advanced analytics into live interactions requires specialized capabilities and infrastructure.
- Omnichannel journey management: Coordinating relevant experiences across owned and paid channels demands careful orchestration and technology alignment.
- Attribution gaps: Retailers often struggle to connect customer actions to outcomes, limiting their ability to measure effectiveness and optimize spend.
- Complex operational processes: Planning and managing the many moving parts of customer engagement – people, processes, content, and platforms – creates operational strain.
- Technical flexibility and risk: Integrating cloud and data delivery solutions requires balancing agility with considerations around security, compliance, and performance.
- Feedback and optimization loops: Closing the loop to continuously improve customer experience depends on reliable measurement and learning systems that many brands still lack.
Overcoming these challenges requires a strategic shift – moving beyond fragmented tools and outdated processes toward a unified, intelligent customer experience platform. Only then can retailers meet rising expectations and drive sustainable growth.
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Activating customer journeys with CI360
Personalization at scale is only possible with the right infrastructure. SAS Customer Intelligence 360 (CI360) provides that foundation, enabling brands to orchestrate every stage of the customer journey in real time – from discovery to conversion and beyond.
Built on six strategic pillars, CI360 empowers teams to:
- Customer data unification – Building a single, trusted view of each customer across channels and systems
- Advanced analytics & targeting – Applying predictive models and segmentation to identify high-value audiences
- Personalization and testing – Delivering dynamic content, offers, and experiences tailored to individual preferences
- Omnichannel experience delivery – Coordinating consistent interactions across web, mobile, email, social, and in-store channels
- Real-time decisioning – Automating next-best actions and optimizing engagement in the moment
- Measurement & optimization – Continuously assessing performance to improve outcomes over time
Real-time personalization within CI360 is powered by 6 integrated capabilities: Plan, Listen, Understand, Decide, Act, and Measure. Retailers align on budgets and content strategies, capture signals across customer touchpoints, and analyze behavior to build rich customer profiles. Automated decisioning determines the most relevant journey for each individual, enabling timely, personalized interactions, with performance continuously tracked and optimized.
This full-cycle engagement model allows retailers to turn customer data into actionable insights, ensuring every touchpoint along the journey is relevant, seamless, and value-driven.
Bringing it all together: Driving results across the retail journey
Measuring success across critical KPIs
When real-time personalization is done right, the impact is not just visible – it’s measurable. With SAS Customer Intelligence 360, retailers can track progress across three critical dimensions:
- Customer Experience KPIs
- Operational KPIs
- Financial KPIs
This data-driven approach creates a clear line of sight from strategic goals to tangible outcomes.
Delivering personalized customer experiences
CI360 empowers teams to unify data, segment audiences, and activate real-time decisions across all channels. Whether sending targeted promotions, recommending products, or delivering service messages, each interaction is backed by advanced analytics and contextual insights.
By creating a single view of the customer, retailers can deliver consistent, relevant experiences that adapt dynamically to individual behaviors and preferences.
Enabling a seamless retail customer journey
The vision for a modern retail journey spans six connected stages: awareness, research, consideration, purchase, service, and loyalty. CI360 provides the capabilities to engage customers at every touchpoint – moving from insight to action in a continuous cycle.
This end-to-end orchestration ensures that each moment is optimized, measurable, and designed to build lasting relationships and sustainable growth.
Conclusion
The retail industry is entering a new era – one where customer expectations are shaped by relevance, speed, and experience. Meeting these expectations requires more than traditional marketing tactics. It demands an ecosystem of real-time personalization, guided by unified data and intelligent decisioning.
SAS Customer Intelligence 360 offers the tools to build that ecosystem: to personalize every step of the customer journey, to act on insight at scale, and to translate moments into measurable growth.
Retailers ready to lead must move from campaign thinking to journey thinking – from segmentation to individualization – and from delayed reaction to real-time action.
The opportunity is here. The tools are ready. Contact Kyanon Digital to elevate your retail strategy with real-time personalization. The next move is yours.
