Food Retail Market Overview
Food retail has changed significantly in recent years with the evolution of packaged food, ready-to-eat meals, health awareness, and consumers’ demands. Price, convenience, and wellness have become the most significant focus, and customer needs have shifted in accordance with these trends over the past decade. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic caused a substantial setback for companies in the food and beverage industry and food retail market. While there was a sudden upsurge in demand for home-cooked food, packaged food, and retail food, companies struggled to maintain business continuity, meet changing needs, track new hygiene and safety protocols, and overcome the implications of the pandemic.
Understanding customer needs the first step towards creating an ideal customer experience (CX), attracting and retaining consumers, and maintaining a strategic edge. With customer needs analysis, companies can develop superior products, improve their in-store and eCommerce shortcomings, provide consumers with unparalleled offerings, and significantly differentiate their products and services. As the industry grows, many industries leverage customer needs assessment and customer intelligence solutions and address their weaknesses to improve operations before entering the post-COVID era.
In a growing market such as food retail, companies require in-depth insights into their customers’ needs, preferences, and demands, to maintain high customer satisfaction. Request a free proposal to learn how Infiniti’s customer needs assessment helps food retailers understand their target market.
Business Challenges
The client is a renowned food retail chain based in North America that started to lose ground due to the rapidly changing consumer preferences and needs, the sudden upsurge in demand, and the impact of COVID-19 on the food and beverage industry. The retailer witnessed a significant change in its competitors’ offerings and noticed an increased need for omnichannel marketing and sales platforms. As the pandemic’s business implications worsened and nations announced lockdowns, consumers became highly dependent on convenient, well-priced, and hygienic packaged foods, canned foods, and ready-to-eat meals. To keep pace with this sudden change, ensure consumer satisfaction was high, and meet consumers’ new needs, the company chose to leverage Infiniti’s expertise in offering customer needs assessment. With this engagement, the food retailer wanted to:
- Understand consumers’ satisfaction in a better way regarding their products and services
- Overcome the impact of COVID-19
- Identify, evaluate and meet consumers’ needs
- Improve their omnichannel marketing and sales services
As the food and beverage industry develops strategies to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers’ needs and demands have changed drastically. Request more information to learn how our solutions help companies prepare for the new normal.
Our Approach
Infiniti’s customer intelligence experts developed a detailed approach that included four phases. They helped the client attain the relevant data to improve their offerings and adjust to the market changes. The customer needs engagement included the following:
- The first phase included a customer satisfaction analysis to help the food retailer understand and evaluate their customers’ feedback for their offerings and competitors’ offerings.
- For the second phase, Infiniti’s experts conducted a customer needs assessment to identify changing and unmet needs in the food retail market and improve their offerings as per data.
- A best practices assessment was conducted in the third phase to help the company identify methods to improve its online sales platforms and digital marketing initiatives.
- Lastly, our experts conducted a competitive intelligence study to help the client compare their offerings with competitors and identify organizational weaknesses.
Business Outcomes
With Infiniti’s customer needs a solution, the client developed an unparalleled understanding of the factors impacting their market and the changing dynamics influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The customer needs assessment data helped the client identify unmet needs, offer differentiated products to maintain a competitive edge, increase customer attraction, and help consumers cope with the pandemic’s impact.
The customer satisfaction analysis helped the company identify its shortcomings, missing offerings, and ways to improve its offerings with customer input and relevant data. Moreover, this allowed the company to stock more relevant products and strengthened its service platforms substantially. Additionally, the best practices assessment helped the food retailer identify better strategies for omnichannel marketing and eCommerce sales platforms and enabled significant change and growth for their business.
With insights into competitors’ effective strategies, weaknesses, offerings, and target market segment, the client successfully adapted their marketing strategies and included more personalized and demanded offerings in their retail stores. Further, Infiniti’s customer needs assessment helped clients develop and maintain a loyal customer base as they prepare to enter the post-COVID era and overcome the negative impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the food retail industry. The engagement enabled sustainable growth, helped the client develop data-driven strategies, improve their offerings, and successfully launch an improved online platform for sales.
An upsurge in demand, changes in hygiene policies, and new market trends require unique and relevant approaches. Connect with our industry experts to learn how our solutions can help your organization adapt to every change and prepare for upcoming developments.
