Ever thought, how hard it was for companies earlier to analyze the market feasibility of their products in the market, to know if there is ample demand or not for their offering or if they are pricing it right. Many great products failed because either they were launched ahead of time and customers were not ready for it, or sometimes they were a bit late to make an impact in the market due to heavy competition. Problems like these had little to no solutions, the only thing which could’ve been done back then was just rely on manual analysis & assumptions, which was a headache and not totally reliable because an ultra-small sample population of potential customers doesn’t speak for all.

Have times changed?

That time is now gone, with the new era enriched with technology-driven processes of Data Intelligence. Now, a huge amount of data is being collected and assembled, making all of it ready for data analysis. Business Intelligence is organizing all that data to make necessary forecasts out of it for future feasibility of their product lines and to expand their business. Business Intelligence is helping them out in transforming meaningless data into knowledge banks to provide value to their decisions.

Do we really require Business Intelligence in the Retail industry?

With fast growing economies, higher purchasing powers of customers, consumer demands & needs are increasing every day with increasing disposable incomes. Customers are looking for quick indulgent, excellent services and latest products in line abiding by ongoing trends.

Business Intelligence is coming to the rescue of these companies by helping them out in understanding not only needs and demands of their customers but their behavior as well. Now companies are creating demand by putting needs in mind of customers. They make customers feel the necessity of their products. Better buying and selling experiences has been provided these days because times have changed to philosophy of “Customer is King”.

Advancement in technology has made sure to forecast what is that consumer will be using next. Companies who are doing maximum utilization of business intelligence are getting ahead of competitions in terms of understanding their potential customers and their future needs.

Major benefits of Business Intelligence in Retail industry 

  • Understanding consumer behavior: Companies are using history of frequent searches, shopping pattern of customers to understand their needs and preferences and they post individual ads or personalized offers to those potential customers to increase sales revenue.
  • Easier analysis of trends: Reporting tools such as Power Business Intelligence can make customer reports & dashboards to show customer’s current popular trends in form of charts, making it easier to evaluate and analyze consumer attributes.
  • Tracking moves of customers: After tracking every click, adding in carts, discarding from carts, actual buying pattern. It has become easier for companies to see the popularity of their products. Companies are making patterns out of these tracking results to use it in a fruitful manner.
  • Handling non-performing products: After in-depth analysis, now companies are able to push non-performing products by making great combos, without losing out any money in giving unnecessary discounts. Also, companies gets an idea of how much to be stocked during which season or time frames.
  • Strategic product placement: In a retail store, you can always notice, cold drinks are kept near chips & other snacks because studies suggest 70% consumers who visit store just for cold drinks, will think of buying nearly placed snack and vice versa. Chewing gum, chocolates are kept near the payment counter, so customers waiting in billing queue will notice it and will be tempted to buy it.

Revolutionary usage of Business Intelligence in Retail 

Amazon Go entered the global market with a bang, where the stores don’t have any billing or checkout counters. You can just enter, pick up products of your choice and walk out of the store. Integrated cameras, multiple sensors and weighing scales will do the work of checking your shopping cart and money will automatically get deducted from Amazon Pay accounts of customers, via facial recognition technology. This is the pace of the future of retail industry ignited by Amazon as a starter. Many more ground-breaking technologies are yet to come in boost up experiential retail.