Discover how retail business intelligence (BI) solutions empower retailers with data-driven insights to optimize marketing campaigns and improve inventory planning.
Alena Kuptsova //April 12, 2023//
Discover how retail business intelligence (BI) solutions empower retailers with data-driven insights to optimize marketing campaigns and improve inventory planning.
Alena Kuptsova //April 12, 2023//
Data is fueling retail these days, adding a new dimension to understanding and anticipating customer needs. To maintain sales volumes and a competitive edge, traditional brick-and-mortar operators should start creating customer experiences that extend beyond the physical space. Let’s see how dedicated retail business intelligence solutions are used to harness business analytics and drive sales.
BI tools capture all consumer activities, track sales and inventory metrics and reveal insights about buyers, sales and inventory. These insights can then support strategic and tactical retail decisions.
As input, BI solutions use information from CRMs, databases, emailing systems, beacons and other sources. As output, they not only generate reports on the current state of business but also enrich them with advanced analytics, NLP queries and machine learning algorithms.
Proper use of BI insights can bring many improvements:
Let’s now look into each retail BI application in more detail.
Retail BI solutions help sales teams increase the store’s performance and build customer loyalty. By exploring customer histories captured through PoS and CRM and aggregated within a BI database, employees can gauge shoppers’ behavioral patterns and preferences. This way, sales associates can better understand of customers’ interests, purchase history and shopping habits and offer them personalized recommendations.
Personalized shopping journeys and customer service is no longer a nice-to-have but an essential requirement for retailers aiming to grow continuously. Thus, the ability to aggregate structured and unstructured data has become invaluable for understanding and envisioning customer needs.
BI tools enable a fine-grained funnel analysis that allows retail owners to review and improve customer engagement during every interaction. The access to customers’ preferences and purchase histories enables retailers to offer expected tailored experiences.
Business intelligence solutions help brands ask the right questions and define the most relevant KPIs:
Businesses equipped with retail business intelligence can better understand their audiences and tailor their marketing messages granularly. While actual sales happen in a physical space, traditional retailers can reinforce their brick-and-mortar revenue with online marketing activities. By collecting and analyzing information from social media, web browsers, user forums, or email campaigns, retail analytics helps predict purchasing trends and optimize in-store marketing activities.
Smart retail business intelligence tools provide a central repository for all inventory and customer data pooled from multiple systems, such as PoS, warehouse management and ERPs, and can analyze it, uncovering weaknesses and opportunities.
Retail BI and operational intelligence help business owners refine inventory by:
When analyzing the retail business intelligence market, one can see that there’s no shortage of vendors and platforms to choose from. To find the solution for their needs, retailers should first conduct an in-depth assessment of their requirements.
The pressure on traditional retail from online stores and marketplaces is great, so brick-and-mortar companies need to upgrade their analytics. retail business intelligence can process real-time insights about retail operations and deliver insights to support business decisions, promote customer loyalty and increase business profitability. Non-adopters will continue to struggle, while those ready to embrace the BI approach will be well-positioned to thrive.
Alena Kuptsova is a Technology Research Analyst at Itransition, a software development company based in Denver, CO. She analyzes current digital transformation trends and explores the opportunities the emerging technologies bring to businesses across industries.