Increase Revenue And Performance With Retail Analytics
By Paula Da Silva, Senior VP of Sales, CitiXsys
In today’s competitive retail environment, customers expect more from retailers than ever before — product information, relevant promotions, visibility into inventory — and online channels have created additional pressures to offer low prices and unparalleled customer experiences. Staying relevant depends upon optimizing operations, maximizing margins, and better understanding your customers. Retail analytics can help by giving you the data you need to drive operational efficiencies and to personalize customer experiences. Following are three steps you must take to truly benefit from the insights data can provide.
1. Define KPIs
The conclusions you draw from data can only be as good as the data you use. Make sure you are evaluating the key performance indicators (KPIs) that truly measure real business results. In addition, make sure your team understands the importance of accuracy when maintaining, for example, inventory records and customer data. Inaccurate data can lead to costly errors.
Analyzing massive amounts of data is an overwhelming task. That’s where visual retail analytics solutions come in. They enable you to manage your data and to produce actionable reports in formats that are easy for you and your staff to understand. Reports can be generated for your sales team, marketers, store managers, and sales associates that track performance and bottom-line impact.
2. Seek Actionable Insights
With your report in hand, the next step is to use it to uncover insights. In today’s highly competitive retail environment, it’s risky to base decisions on guesswork or intuition. Train your staff — and yourself — to rely on retail analytics to point the best direction for decisions such as purchasing, labor scheduling, marketing and promotions, and store displays.
Your retail analytics solutions may also provide insights into your business that you’ve never had before. With this technology, you may be able for the first time to drill down into customer segments in different geographic regions by season, perhaps even looking at individual months or days of the week. You can gain the ability to predict what your customers will demand at each of your locations, and when those demands will occur. These insights may even be able to help you plan orders more efficiently and control costs.
Most importantly, the insights you gain from data can help you improve the customer experiences you provide. The items shoppers want will be in stock, sales associates most skilled in handling high traffic will be scheduled at busy times, and buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) will run seamlessly.
3. Analyze Data for Growth
Retail analytics can also help you beyond day-to-day decisions and direct business growth. Data analysis will also show you trends related to finances, staff or location performance, and operational efficiencies. By monitoring business data, you may recognize trends before they are apparent at sales-floor level and have the opportunity to take corrective action before problems escalate — and before your competitors.
Benefits at Every Level
Retail analytics isn’t just for large enterprises; independent and specialty retailers will also find value in analyzing data and using it for decision-making. Moreover, data insights aren’t just for managers — sharing data analysis with your staff at all levels can provide a gauge of their performance and direction for improvement. And having access to data insights can also help employees at every level do their jobs more efficiently, productively, and accurately.
Adding data analysis to your technology arsenal is becoming a necessity to keep up with customer demands and with your competition. An investment in retail analytics will be an investment in the future success of your business.
Our e-book, “What's Next for Retail: Navigating Your Business from Now into the Future,” includes insights on where retail is today and where retailers need to be.
About Paula Da Silva
Paula Da Silva is the senior vice president of sales for CitiXsys, a provider of retail consulting, retail management software and point-of-sale systems.
About iVend Retail
iVend Retail is the omnichannel retail management solution for the way retailers work today. It delivers a fully integrated solution designed to enable change, not just built to last. iVend Retail innovates retail technology, providing a technically-superior solution and offering open APIs which can be integrated broadly with leading ERPs and customer-facing applications. For more information about iVend and CitiXsys, please visit www.ivend.com.
About CitiXsys
With more than 1,000 customers in over 46 countries using its products and solutions, CitiXsys is a leading provider of software products for the retail sector. CitiXsys has its corporate headquarters in New York and offices in Toronto, Mexico City, Panama City, London, Dubai, New Delhi, Singapore, Sydney and Melbourne.