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Liz Adeniji - The Philippine Star
May 18, 2025 | 12:00am
MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine retail sector has seen one of its biggest years yet with about P4.7 trillion revenue generated in 2024, around four million daily visitors at the famous SM Supermalls, and a fast-growing e-commerce sector. But the best is yet to come for the industry poised to have a “banner year” in 2025, according to the Philippine Retailers Association. The landscape is ripe for retailers to leverage the booming e-commerce, high mall foot traffic thanks to Filipinos’ love for malls, and a new tax refund scheme for foreign tourists that is expected to give a boost to local shops.
Imagine amping up these gains with conversational commerce — bringing the storefront experience to consumers with real-time, personalized conversations and allowing them to interact with brands directly, at any point in their shopping journey, and through the channels they prefer most.
There wouldn’t be a better time to take stock of key learnings in 2024 and strategize to unlock evergreen growth in the days ahead. The industry, however, is not without its challenges. Retailers could find 2025 particularly challenging as competition intensifies with the expanding role of AI. Brands have incorporated AI to streamline operations, ramp up marketing, and gather data to better understand their customers. From purchase history, loyalty program status to buying behaviors, data proved to be an integral part of businesses, and Players who know their customers best win. However, as it turns out, only 64 percent of brands in the Philippines say they deeply understand their customers, as revealed in Twilio’s 2024 State of Customer Engagement Report.
Customer data for most businesses is simply too fragmented and can’t be activated for true personalization. Too often, that data is just sitting in data warehouses. Meanwhile, customers are clicking around on the brands’ websites, trying and failing to find the perfect item to purchase. To convert those clicks into buyer’s journeys that end with sales and happy customers, brands need to embrace personalization to gain competitive advantage.
Personalization enables retailers to increase conversion rates and reduce cart abandonment by delivering recommendations tailored to each user’s preferences and history. By collecting and unifying customer data throughout the year, brands can effectively drive personalization especially when peak shopping events, like the country’s extended holiday season, arrive.
If you want to gear up for growth this 2025, get started on these key steps now.
1. Unify your customer data
Instead of a unified, coherent portrait, most companies’ customer profiles are more like a complicated puzzle, showing a piece from customer success, a piece from sales, a piece from product interactions, a piece from the holidays, a piece from the summer — and none of them are particularly connected. Marketers and retailers might have to access half a dozen different dashboards to see different slices of their customer set.
Fortunately, you can reassemble the pieces of customer data into a more realistic, unified picture of our customers. Customer data platforms do that by aligning data in various applications and data warehouses and creating unified profiles for each customer that draw from data across the entire organization. The goal is to build a 360-degree view that connects real-time data like web traffic and mobile app data, purchase history from data warehouses and CRMs, and communications data from previous interactions over email, voice, SMS, web chats, and WhatsApp.
2. Leverage AI for next-level personalization
Once customer data has been unified, retailers can leverage AI to surface insights and create personalized activations. This goes beyond product recommendation to displaying relevant offers and discounts in real time, notifying consumers about products they’d like, and delivering personalized messages when and where they’re most effective for each customer.
Consider this scenario: A consumer goes to a retail website or app and clicks around a set of catalog items. Armed with real-time data, the app knows what they purchased in the past and what they’re likely to purchase this time. It might offer a discount or suggest a premium product to nudge them towards completing that purchase. If it’s an anonymous shopper, the app can examine what other consumers like them typically buy based on what’s known about their location or behavior.
Imagine further if the consumer had the ability to send a message in real time and get a quick, personalized response from the app or website via whatever channel they prefer — SMS, web chat, or in-app chat.
3. Incorporate the physical
Personalization of the full customer experience does not only encompass digital channels. With in-store shopping still highly part of the Filipino buying culture, retailers and malls could drum up creativity to liven up their spaces through activations, incorporating tactile experiences and local cultural or design nuances that resonate with shoppers.
Even in brick-and-mortar spaces, retailers can gain a deeper understanding of consumers’ shopping behavior and use that piece of information to personalize their experience. One way to do this is to collect and organize data across physical and digital touchpoints and to connect these systems. This way, whether it’s an online agent helping resolve customer issues or an in-store sales staff helping a shopper access online rewards points — retailers will have the data they need to provide a seamless, useful, and tailored shopping experience. It’s all about putting data to work for a delightful customer experience!
The arrival of conversational commerce
Taking the three steps above will not only help you prepare for 2025, but also for the next generation of retail, known as conversational commerce.
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Adeniji is Twilio’s Segment Business vice president for Asia-Pacific and Japan
