Introduction
Today our life is intertwined with retail. It’s everywhere, there is no other thing which impacts our life as hugely as this. This has made the retail market fast-paced & competitive than ever before. The next question which naturally arises out of this scenario is how to 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 picture. It entails processes & 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, & this information can be used to enhance customers’ shopping experience making them your loyal customer & generating a series of repeat purchases which boost your revenue – the golden bird which we all eye. With the help of 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 which must be taken in a particular sequence to achieve a particular or some specific business outcomes. Business intelligence forecasting & reporting involves a collection of technologies, applications, & practices for collection, processing, analysis, & 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, & truly get a pulse over your customers through data mining & statistics. Market is changing as we speak. One needs to keep oneself abreast of changing customer behavior so that they can finetune their strategic vision to achieve growth.
Why BI is required for the Retail industry?
There are so many benefits of collecting & analyzing retail business data. Business Intelligence in Strategic Business can definitely help the retail’s bottom-line. Here’s how it helps.
Grow your retail store business
Retailers look for launching new stores in favorable places 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 & 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, & error prone manual data analysis a thing of the past & welcome smart, interactive reports. These reports provide you distinct patterns in sales, regulations, inventory, margins, for each store & help you optimize your processes to increase profit. You can easily uncover reasons behind why some things are working & why some are not & fix the problems accordingly or replicate the one store’s success story to 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 & socially responsible.
- Shoppers want to interact with retailers on multiple channels with huge expectations & consistency.
- Today’s customers are highly educated & sensitized, they have access to a variety of information through social media & internet.
- Information travels at high speed. One good or bad experience in one part of the world quickly travels across the globe to the other part of the globe. You got to be on top of reputation management.
It’s very important to track the changing customer needs to drive effective marketing, design, product development, & other initiatives which affect your sales. With an advanced strategy and business intelligence solution you can:
- Analyze data to find patterns in customer purchasing behavior.
- Plan, assess, & monitor the performance of your promotional activities.
- Know how your customers react to marketing incentives, seasonal promotions, & discounts.
- Collect social media data & analyze the engagement level (likes, comments, & shares) to measure customer loyalty.
This information will help you to improve forecast accuracy, and analyze & visualize every facet of your customer data to attract more customers & 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 which bothers retailers — they face under-performing inventory & out-of-stock products. Supply chain operations have become complicated because of a number of reasons such as diversification in sales & distribution formats. A retail BI Software helps in process improvements across the organization resulting in reduced markdowns & greater inventory effectiveness. As you get access to insightful data, you can follow the demand patterns & see how the supply chain network is functioning & boost up your day to day operation. Get real-time insight into supply & demand dynamics & prevent under or over stocking. This helps in greater integrated business planning efficiency.
BI gives 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 the market 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 help of a BI Reporting tool for 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 & competitive forecasting. You can get insight on your competitor’s offerings, determine what products will better sell, & identify potential opportunities. Business analytics strategy for Retail can help you to compare your products’ performance against your competitors, do predictive analysis, & fine-tune pricing. Furthermore, you will be able to optimize costs, maximize profitability, & act on the right information at the right time; all these will help you to stay one step ahead in the race.
Conclusion
Navigating through the new, dynamic, & 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 & BI implementation & use. 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 & behavior, helps you to understand competition, & benchmark one location against other while improving performance across all locations simultaneously. With WovVBI on your side, this retail game you will definitely win.