Introduction
Today, our lives are intertwined with retail. It’s everywhere; there is no other thing that impacts our lives as hugely as this. This has made the retail market more fast-paced and competitive than ever before. The next question that naturally arises out of this scenario is, How do I beat this competition? And from market leaders to researchers, they all say the same thing: it’s got to be the right information at the right time. This is where the Business Intelligence Strategy comes into play. It entails processes and technologies to track end-to-end processes, collect as much data as one can, and then process it to produce the most insightful information. For example, BI can track how customers interact with your stores, and this information can be used to enhance customers’ shopping experiences, making them loyal customers and generating a series of repeat purchases that boost your revenue—the golden bird that we all eye. With the help of a successful BI Strategy, retailers can make smart, efficient decisions, allowing businesses to quickly alter prices or change merchandise offerings.
What is a Business Intelligence Strategy?
It’s a set of data-driven initiatives that must be taken in a particular sequence to achieve a particular or some specific business outcomes. Business intelligence forecasting and reporting involves a collection of technologies, applications, and practices for the collection, processing, analysis, and presentation of business information to support intelligent decision-making with the ultimate aim of growing your business. In this roadmap, you will measure your performance, seek competitive advantage, and truly get a pulse on your customers through data mining and statistics. The market is changing as we speak. One needs to keep oneself abreast of changing customer behavior so that they can fine-tune their strategic vision to achieve growth.
Why is BI required for the Retail industry?
There are so many benefits to collecting and analyzing retail business data. Business Intelligence in Strategic Business can definitely help the retail industry’s bottom line. Here’s how it helps:
Grow your retail store business.
Retailers look to launch new stores in favorable locations to gain traction. Though it’s a great opportunity to increase your customer base, it also presents some challenges. Each of your stores must deliver according to your brand promise and must do so at every customer touch point. And, considering the competitive nature of the industry, there is no room for a lackadaisical approach. With a good Business Intelligence Solution for retail, you can make inefficient, time-consuming, and error-prone manual data analysis a thing of the past and welcome smart, interactive reports. These reports provide you with distinct patterns in sales, regulations, inventory, and margins for each store and help you optimize your processes to increase profit. You can easily uncover the reasons behind why some things are working and why some are not, fix the problems accordingly, or replicate one store’s success story for the others.
Stay on top of changing customer trends.
Change in the socio-economic condition of the people is driving key changes in retail trends, which one must be abreast of. You can see the following trends in this retail cultural shift:
- Customers are looking for variety, but the products should be high-quality and socially responsible.
- Shoppers want to interact with retailers on multiple channels with huge expectations and consistency.
- Today’s customers are highly educated and sensitized; they have access to a variety of information through social media and the internet.
- Information travels at high speed. One good or bad experience in one part of the world quickly travels across the globe to another part of the globe. You’ve got to be on top of reputation management.
It’s very important to track changing customer needs to drive effective marketing, design, product development, and other initiatives that affect your sales. With an advanced strategy and business intelligence solution, you can:
- Analyze the data to find patterns in customer purchasing behavior.
- Plan, assess, and monitor the performance of your promotional activities.
- Know how your customers react to marketing incentives, seasonal promotions, and discounts.
- Collect social media data and analyze the engagement level (likes, comments, and shares) to measure customer loyalty.
This information will help you improve forecast accuracy and analyze and visualize every facet of your customer data to attract more customers and increase your margins.
Helps sort out supply chain complexities
A great retail operation is often enabled by efficient merchandising. However, there are a number of issues that bother retailers, including underperforming inventory and out-of-stock products. Supply chain operations have become complicated for a number of reasons, such as diversification in sales and distribution formats. A retail BI Software helps with process improvements across the organization, resulting in reduced markdowns and greater inventory effectiveness. As you get access to insightful data, you can follow the demand patterns, see how the supply chain network is functioning, and boost your day-to-day operations. Get real-time insight into supply and demand dynamics and prevent under- or overstocking. This helps with greater integrated business planning efficiency.
BI gives a competitive advantage.
This is one of the very competitive industries that we are talking about. With few entry barriers, too many players are in the fray to get a piece of the pie. Here, it’s very important to keep a tab on your competitors in the market. You need to get answers to these questions: What’s your position in the market? Are your prices competitive? How are your competitors doing? What are the products they are offering? Are they running any promotions? Getting answers to these questions requires great effort if done manually; taking the help of a BI Reporting tool for the retail industry will hugely cut the effort. With a great retail BI solution, you can do real-time monitoring of your competitors, including business model analysis and competitive forecasting. You can get insight on your competitor’s offerings, determine what products will sell better, and identify potential opportunities. A business analytics strategy for Retail can help you compare your products’ performance against your competitors, do predictive analysis, and fine-tune pricing. Furthermore, you will be able to optimize costs, maximize profitability, and act on the right information at the right time; all these will help you stay one step ahead in the race.
Conclusion
Navigating through the new, dynamic, and stimulating world of retail can be quite challenging on your own if you don’t have the right technology partner. An experienced technology partner like WovVTech can prove to be an incredibly valuable asset in evaluating your unique business needs, strategizing a data-driven plan, and implementing and using BI. A great retail business intelligence software like WovVBI can solve many challenges that you face in your day-to-day business operations. It gives complete insights into customer trends and behavior, helps you understand competition, and benchmarks one location against another while improving performance across all locations simultaneously. With WovVBI on your side, you will definitely win this retail game.
Download “Retail of Future” brochure here.
