For retailers, data is both their biggest asset and biggest challenge. It’s the key to understanding and engaging consumers. It lets retailers efficiently and effectively plan product assortment mix at the hyper local level.
At the store level, data is at the core of effective store optimization and when it comes to supply chain management, data means visibility and flexibility at a global level.
Retailers competing on low margins have known for decades that data is a powerful tool and big data takes it and supercharges it for the modern multi-channel retail environment.
Retailers who embrace big data throughout their organization can unlock hidden value and many other functions as well. For instance; risk management presents a huge opportunity for retailers to use their existing data to improve the bottom line.
What Can Big Data Tell Us About Customers
Today’s consumers know more about businesses than ever before. And business owners know more about their customer as well. Without the insights that big data analytics provide, businesses risk missing opportunities to engage customers with the kinds of products and offers they are searching for or maybe didn’t even know they wanted.
Big data lets retailers target consumers with personalized suggestion, upsell, and cross-sell based on prior behavior and predictive models. This can include acquisition pattern analysis, collaborative filtering based on associations between products, customer specific scorecards, real-time store sales modeling, and can even determine optimal pricing for individual consumers.
The ability to predict what consumers will purchase and for how much is incredibly useful.
For retailers, big data means intelligently measuring, monitoring, and modeling their business in real time. This creates the ability to act on what shoppers are telling them efficiently improving customer acquisition and conversion for lower costs and increased revenues.
In addition to what data tells retailers about customers, a real-time insights into the entire business creates flexibility during periods of supply volatility or market uncertainty. This makes retail supply chains more efficient and effective, controlling costs, and enabling effective supplier coordination.
