By Amelia Beattie, Chief Executive of Liberty Two Degrees

In this increasingly digitally-connected world, it pays to invest in and leverage data analytics to improve the customer experience. For retail mall operators, the insights they draw from data analytics enable them to provide customers with a superior shopping experience. Through data analytics, mall oper­ators can gain insights into customer behaviour, which they can share with tenants, positioning them to thrive within their malls. Insights from data analytics can help tenants make better business decisions, optimise business processes, and accomplish day-to-day business tasks. Sharing insights can also contribute to tenant retention, which is vital for shopping malls.

Developing a data-centric culture is key to successfully driving the execution of customer-centric business strategies. For retail-driven businesses, data and analytics capabilities can be the foundation on which smart solutions for tenants and shoppers are built. Available technology solutions, such as smart cameras and artificial intelligence, generate rich data that captures customer behaviour, enabling landlords to shape their offerings for their tenants and customers.

In its data collection processes, Liberty Two Degrees ensures that it fully complies with all applicable privacy laws of South Africa. No personal information is collected without consent from customers, and any shopper information collected is anonymised, with no capability to make a connection between the collected data and the customer. For example, the smart cameras solution used to count foot traffic can determine a customer’s uniqueness through the use of skeletal frames, which is non-customer identifying information that is assigned a random number. Artificial intelli­gence is used to develop a deep understanding of shopper behaviour within our malls, such as the frequency of their visits, their movements once inside our malls, which days are busiest and the underlying reasons behind this, and understanding the shopping habits of different demographic groups.

Explicit consent is required when customer infor­mation is collected when registering to use free mall Wi-Fi, and it should be stated very clearly how the data shared by shoppers will be used.

The challenge for any business is to resist the temptation to collect data for the sake of it. A business needs clarity on what it seeks to achieve from the data. This will enhance its ability to draw insights from the data it collects and use these to deliver superior experiences for its targeted audiences more affordably while sustainably reducing expenses.

Through its digital transformation initiatives, Liberty Two Degrees always seeks to partner with tenants to deploy solutions that maximise their time when operating within its malls.