Faced with ever more demanding consumers, looking for a tailor-made customer experience, points of sale must show great agility in order to adapt and meet their needs. In the era of digital retail, data is becoming an essential lever for improving shop performance through better customer knowledge. But how can we exploit the full potential of this data? How can we decipher the behaviour and expectations of consumers? To understand this, discover all that a Business Intelligence solution can bring to retailers.
Compile and analyse your data in real time
In the retail sector, one of the main strengths of Business Intelligence is its ability to collect data from multiple sources, process it and exploit it.
With the rise of digital, sales channels have multiplied, prompting retailers to adopt an omnichannel strategy. At the same time, the opportunities to collect data have become more and more numerous. BI can be used to leverage this data to better understand customers, their profiles, needs, and habits.
This valuable data can be used for many purposes:
- Attract more prospects.
- Identify ways to improve the customer experience in-store.
- Strengthen relationships and build customer loyalty.
- Optimise and streamline shelf navigation.
- Improve merchandising.
- Personalise promotional offers.
- Test sales and marketing campaigns before deployment.
- Optimise stock and supply chain management.
- Increase traffic in shops.
- Finally, to increase sales and increase turnover.
Make better decisions with retail KPIs
After analysing the data, it is possible to draw conclusions and compare the historical data with current information in order to make a comprehensive assessment.
For example, a better understanding of the customer’s buying journey allows retail players to determine :
- What are the best areas to attract the consumer’s attention with merchandising actions?
- What are the most strategic promotional spaces.
In general, by better understanding customer habits and behaviours, informed decisions can be made to improve business practices in shops.
Hence the importance of relying on relevant performance indicators. Determining KPIs that are truly relevant to retail and aggregating the data with a good BI solution allows stores to move towards their goals and measure their success.
Some examples of retail KPIs to follow
– Shop traffic, i.e. the number of visitors to the store over a given period.
– The number of transactions, i.e. the number of people who have made a purchase in a given period.
– The conversion rate, which measures the attractiveness and commercial efficiency of the shop. It is calculated as follows: (Number of transactions/Number of visitors) x 100.
– Turnover per square metre, which indicates whether the shop area is being well-used.
– The evolution of sales between two given periods.
– The average basket, which measures the average value of transactions. It is calculated as follows, Turnover / Number of transactions.
– Customer acquisition cost, which is the amount spent to acquire a new customer.
– The number of sales per employee, which enables the sales performance of each salesperson to be analysed.
Adapt your retail KPIs to your business
With features such as data entry, you can analyse, for example, the effects of the weather on sales.
This is exactly what a major fashion retailer has chosen to do through its DigDash Enterprise platform. Every day, the points of sale enter weather data into the tool. Through dynamic dashboards and data visualisation, this information is correlated with shop traffic and sales.
By highlighting the effects of the weather on sales, it is possible to anticipate specific commercial or promotional actions. A good way to counteract the bad weather forecast instead of suffering from it at the point of sale!
Track your retail KPIs with data visualisation
A data analytics solution can generate regular analysis reports, which are very useful for monitoring retail KPIs and measuring the effectiveness of the strategies implemented.
But another advantage of Business Intelligence is its ability to present data and indicators in an understandable and entertaining way. Thanks to data visualisation, it is possible to transform raw, sometimes abstract information into visual representations: graphs, diagrams, curves, maps, diagrams, etc.
Gathered in a dynamic dashboard, the data becomes much easier to interpret and the main issues are highlighted, allowing for faster and better decision making.
Manage shop performance
Through their network of sales outlets, commercial companies seek not only to be as close as possible to their customers and prospects, but also to boost their sales and turnover. However, the results obtained depend largely on the commercial performance of the teams deployed on site.
In addition to implementing an appropriate strategy to increase sales and turnover, the day-to-day management of a shop involves a range of tasks: organising teams, defining schedules, managing orders, managing the product catalogue, etc.
A BI solution is the ideal way to monitor the performance of retail outlets. Indeed, it allows to bring up in real time all the useful data and signals to measure the efficiency of a shop or an entire distribution network.
The result: optimal management of the resources deployed within the network, better planning, the implementation of appropriate sales promotions, as well as a complete audit of the sales performance of the teams.
By compiling data from various sources, then analysing it in real time, Business Intelligence enables retail players to better understand consumers. Dashboards and data visualisation allow them to adjust their strategy to increase their sales and turnover in the long term. BI is also a valuable tool for managing shop performance, thanks in particular to retail KPIs that are represented hastily.
