The last year has shown us all that things can change in an instant – from how we work to how we socialise or even how we shop as consumers.

The changing habits of consumers has caused an industry-wide reset of the way retailers view consumers' needs. Since the beginning of the pandemic, businesses have had to go to great lengths to pivot their business to meet the changed environment.

That's why AIB Merchant Services has launched its all-new Main Street Insights tool to help businesses learn more about  customers and most importantly, grow. While no individual customer or businesses data are identifiable within the platform, Main Street Insights provides valuable insights into your customer base and shopping patterns, comparing your business performance with  groups of similar businesses within your category and locality, and identifying opportunities to grow top-line and bottom-line performance.

Using Main Street Insights, businesses can easily grow by providing key insights through non identifiable and aggregated insights. These will help a business understand customer spending behaviours and patterns, comparing sales to other groups of similar businesses, analysing marketing campaigns and tracking the progress of the company overall.

How can you use Main Street Insights?

To get started, you will need to already be a user of AIB Merchant Services payment facilities. If you're not, you can request a call back via the Merchant Services homepage to get started. AIB Merchant Services is one of the largest providers of payment solutions in Ireland, processing millions of payments every day.

The Main Street Insights tool is a complimentary tool available to all AIB Merchant Services customers in the Republic of Ireland so there is no additional fee to get set up. It's intuitive to use and can work across multiple outlets if you own more than one business or have more than one location.

From the main dashboard, you will have everything you need at your fingertips. All of the data and tools are broken into categories, making it easy to navigate, even when you're busy. The key categories are: My Dashboard, My Store, My Customers, My Neighbourhood, My Bookmarks and My Social Media.

My Dashboard provides you with a clear and concise overview of your business performance in respect of revenue, new and returning customers, and key customer demographic trends. If it's historical data you want to look into, you will visit the My Store category. Here you will see all of your easily filtered historical insights in the form of bar charts and tables.

Learning more about your customer base and the locale

My Customers section provides a fascinating overview of your customer base behaviour and trends which allows you to understand and serve your customers better. Of course, all of the data is anonymised and the platform doesn't store personally identifiable information about customers.

To dive deeper into customer behaviour, the My Neighbourhood category allows you to learn more about the  broader spending patterns in your local area. This can help assess how your business is performing in relation to businesses nearby and also to inform future marketing plans, or plans for expansion.

Staying social

Being on social media is no longer a nice-to-have for businesses, especially since the beginning of the pandemic. It is essential to have a presence online targeting your customers and potential customers, and staying on top of trends.

Instead of having to use separate tools, users of Main Street Insights can connect their Facebook, Twitter and Yelp accounts in one place under the My Social Media category. From here you can compose tweets or Facebook posts, see your timeline and follower counts, as well as insights like who your biggest influencers are.

Grow your business with Main Street Insights

Main Street Insights aims to make the lives of business owners easier and more streamlined so that you can get more out of the hard work you're already putting in. If you'd like to learn more about how you can grow your business using Main Street Insights, visit: www.aibms.com/MainStreetInsights/

First Merchant Processing Ireland DAC trading as AIB Merchant Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.