Business intelligence is simply the assembling of numerous data pieces such that it can be utilized as a reference for formulating impeccable marketing strategies. It includes understanding the working of a business system and organizing the demerits and merits of the plan. Business Intelligence today is a technology-driven process that collects and assembles data, making it ready for analysis.
Data intelligence comprises organizing and analyzing data for future endeavors and expanding the business. The internal and external data is gathered and carefully studied to find the loopholes and make more informed decisions in the future. Data intelligence includes activities like Business performance, data mining, online analytics, and event processing.
Business intelligence and data intelligence transform data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into value.
Why do we need these in retail?
In the fast-paced hyper-competitive market, customer demands and requirements have skyrocketed. What really are these customers looking for? The answer to the questions is simple – Instant gratification, impeccable services, and the latest products to keep pace with the ever-changing trends. Data Intelligence is required to understand the requirements of the consumer for a better selling and buying experience. If analyzed in a proper way, such analysis can take you too far as to predict what the customer needs next. Organizations that can identify their potential customers and broadly understand their requirements are already far ahead of their competitors.
How does this technique work?
Online shopping has rapidly gained momentum because it enables customers to shop at odd hours and from any geography. BI tools access the consumer’s historical search data and their most frequent and recent searched products. Business Intelligence reporting tools like Power BI generate customer analytics reports to display customer trends in the form of charts, making it easy to analyze and assess consumer characteristics. These charts can be utilized by the organizations for introspection into their organizations over the years. It can be utilized to determine how well a product has hit in the market or what the current popular customer demands are.
How can this data be exploited for sheer benefits?
Apart from providing an insight into the organization’s sales and progress over the years, this data can also be analyzed for numerous other uses. A pattern emerges after tracking every click, every product viewed, and every product bought and discarded by the customer. Based on these patterns, the organization can promote multiple schemes and offers. For instance, after careful data analysis, the organizations can short down products that are most likely to be purchased collaboratively. These products can then be sold with an attractive scheme of ‘buy one get one free. The companies will also know how much they should stock up on a particular product.
Smart advertising
Online retail shopping stores such as eBay and Amazon utilize business intelligence for smart advertising. They keep a track record of what particular consumer purchases and searches for. They advertise their other products as per the customers’ recent activities and search. For instance, a person buys a book by Thomas Hardy from the website. The site will then shoot the customer with offers on other Thomas Hardy books and merchandise, on different books of the same genre, and other works of the same author. If, for instance, a person does not make any purchase but searches for tennis racquets, cricket sets, and other sports equipment, then the site has a completely different strategy. It will buzz up with different types of offers on numerous sports equipment to make sure that the consumer finds what he is searching for. It will also advertise merchandise such as headbands, sports shoes, and wristbands, sports outfits, which the customer might need if they decide to play any sport.
Smart communication
Data intelligence can generate personalized communication for the customers using their past purchase histories and areas of interest. One of the retail organizations has used data intelligence to create weekly special emails with personalized offers in the United States. This implementation buzzes more than 800,000 emails per week with data intelligence-driven personalization in each email.
Retail Revolution
Numerous organizations and stores have embraced data intelligence and made tremendous changes in their stores. One of the retail stores found out that men are more likely to buy nappies rather than women. Therefore, they strategically placed a beer outlet next to the nappies section in their outlets. And in a matter of a couple of months, their beer sales noticeably shot up! It seems spectacular, right?
Amazon, one of the retail giants that have internalized and embraced data intelligence with open arms. Recently, they started predicting what the customers were likely to purchase next. Accordingly, they shifted around their stocks to make the desired item available at the outlet nearest to the customer’s geography.
The future face of retail is Amazon Go. It is a store without a billing or check-out counter. Well, how do the consumers pay for the products then? They can walk out with the products they like. Weight scales, integrated cameras, load cells, pressure sensors, etc., record the complete shopping process determining what people return or take off to shelves along with the desirable time taken to analyze, read, consider, choose or put back a product. In a nutshell, the data offered by all different input devices or sensors assist in generating consumer behavior intelligence which can, in turn, be utilized to boost sales and make apt predictions. The way data and business data intelligence is used here to revolutionize retail’s face are exemplary completely!
Wrapping Up
The core potential of an organization lies with its data and its people. Business intelligence urges organizations to empower their people by utilizing the data at hand. Extemporizing its data handling mechanism is the most crucial internal revolution that an organization can make. Knowledge is power; proper data analysis will power the organizations to come up with attractive schemes and sell their products in a smart way. At Polestar solutions, we will help your business make better decisions by providing expert-level business intelligence (BI) services.