Retail – The Shift From ‘Data’ To ‘Data Analytics’
I write about fintech, data, and everything around it
A survey carried out by NRF to locate current market trends in retail reveal interesting data of increasing number of customers engaging online for purchases. Let’s be practical here, people, especially millennials are engaging in varied activities in their everyday lives and this results in time constraints. More and more people are beginning to value convenience over money. As a retailer, it has never been so crucial to offer great online purchasing experience to consumers.
There are two critical questions that retailers are faced with today:
- How to leverage the increasing purchasing power of consumers?
- How to provide a great digital experience to increase loyal customer base?
The answer lies in providing flawless, seamless, easy, and customized customer experience.
Easy accessibility in digital channels continues to be the first touchpoint for the consumers. Customer data is a wealth for retailers to drive new strategies for revenue generation and cost management in the race towards turning profitable.
But even if you have tons of data at your disposal, what do you even do with it?!
It’s high time we realize that the world is shifting from just ‘data’ to ‘data analytics.’ PwC’s 19th Annual Global CEO Survey (2016) shows that 68% of the global CEOs see data and analytics technology as generating the greatest returns for stakeholder engagement.
CEOs, product managers, sales, and marketing analysts are in greater need to understand and analyze the patterns of consumer purchases to enhance their future procurement. For this very reason Jason Goldberg, the retail geek, says, “machine learning is going to be a greater disruption in retail than digital ever was.”
Retail Software Management
Artificial Intelligence, particularly machine learning is automating the process of aligning unstructured data into relevant categories of analytics based on which price setting, cross-sell & upsell, promotional pricing, and markdown optimization is possible to unimaginable lengths.
The focal point of capturing unstructured data is to convert it into analytics to help retail businesses cater to individual customer demands. It is a magnanimous task and can overwhelm analysts and product managers to exhaustion. That’s exactly when you need to redirect efforts to predictive algorithms. Predictive analytics is here to stay and grow as retail businesses help consumers with not just their present purchases but also future buying abilities.
There is nothing better than serving everything on the plate for each consumer and that’s one technology that retail needs to adopt and adapt to for a competitive edge.
Zuci is partnering with retail businesses to extract pattern analytics, price analytics, and trend analytics not just from the end-consumers but also from other retailers. After all, to have an edge one needs to be informed about thy neighbors!
Related Posts
