With the advent of connected devices, sensors, and mobile apps, the amount of available data in the retail sector requires solution oriented Big Data tools and applications to address specific business challenges. For instance, big data applications in retail logistics need availability, assortment, pricing, and layout planning.
Although precise marketing can generate demand more effectively, without suitable operational support, these demands may not translate into sales and hence retailers must rely on the power of Big Data to optimize retail operations. For instance, store layout, shelf design and in-store demand can be optimized based on recorded in-store traffic while retailers carefully balance fulfillment and logistics costs to deliver on their promise from receiving orders to timely delivery to customers.
Historical sales data and loyalty schemes can be used to obtain customer insights for operational planning while granular sales data analysis can help forecast customer demand to provide the right product at the right time at the right place, reduce ordering & inventory holding cost & maintain customer satisfaction. External data such as competitors’ prices, macro-economic and weather conditions can also be used for supply-chain management and dynamic pricing.
However, there are several challenges to overcome to make use of such data, including shortages of people with the right set of skills, the lack of support from suppliers, issues in IT integration, managerial concerns including information sharing and process integration, and physical capability of the supply chain to respond to real-time changes captured by big data.
In addition, customers in this Digital Era have evolving needs. Customers are looking for interactive solutions, an enjoyable and seamless experience thanks to newly developed digital tools, which are enabling significant changes in consumer behavior. We can summarize customer expectations as follows:
•Environmentally friendly solutions : Green computing, Cloud IT, less hardware, less energy
•Instantly available solutions: On-demand content which requires a scalable platform and is a great revenue-generating channel opportunity
•Innovative solutions: Mobile on the go, insightful with dashboards and predictive analytics capability
•Versatile solutions: Omni-channel communication, Mixed-use between the digital and the real world, immersive real-data capturing
Customers have embraced digital touchpoints to consider, evaluate and make their purchases. who expect to be engaged with according to their preferences across their multi-channel journey, most touchpoints being digital:
Providing relevant and personalized information about your products and services through these digital channels and recommending products that best fits the customer persona based on their behavior will enhance the overall customer experience and help translate upsells, cross-sells and higher revenue growth. Your retail business also needs to embrace social media to listen to the Voice of the Customer among other Digital channels.
Provided services need to evolve and you should manage customer expectations by engaging with customers through social media and increasing the automation at different customer touchpoints to reduce churn, acquire new customers, upsell to current customers and cut costs.
Key success factors of retailers include creating an emotional connection with your customer base, creating advocates while communicating directly to your audience, identifying market trends and adapting your supply chain accordingly with amounts of SKUs, whose price can vary in different locations and over time according to local demand and competition.
Oredata will help your retail business to better understand customer behavior using a single customer view, achieve the next level of customer centricity by integrating data from multiple sources such as web, mobile, call center & server side.
In addition, we enable your retail business with Smart Feedback Analytics to model topics and sentiment analysis, classify collected feedbacks and understand customer’s opinions about your branches, services and employees.
We will process your transactions in real-time to generate just in time insights, suggest actions based on your customer’s historical expenditures, search results and social media posts to provide a frictionless personalized experience, all while managing product demand seasonality peaks to ensure availability with streamlined operations.