The business intelligence market is expected to grow with a CAGR of 8.7% and hit the 43.03 bn USD mark by 2028. Further, a recent survey suggests that 58% of companies consider business intelligence crucial for retail and wholesale sectors.
Technological innovation is happening faster than ever and digital transformation is sending ripples across all the industries. As data analytics and business intelligence overtake the hunches and guesswork, the disparate and fragmented industries, such as retail, are looking at a major makeover.
A recent feature in Forbes talks about customers becoming increasingly conscious in terms of making purchases and how important it has become to deliver exceptional services alongside great products.
This has led to the widespread adoption of smart analytics platforms that offer business value across the most crucial 4 verticals, as shown below:
The smart analytics tools allow retail business owners to dig deep into their customer data and uncover hidden insights about service, support, customer journeys, and brand expectations. The software solutions allow them to streamline their business offerings in a customer-centric manner and monitor the results of all such efforts.
We discuss how business intelligence, such as interactive data visualization software, can offer retailing insights to steer your business towards growth. How would the retail industry use business intelligence and what is the best way to leverage it for boosting your business?
Below, we explore these problem statements at length.
Business intelligence allows you to make the most critical business decisions in a data-driven manner. You can dig deep into the customer data and find out what issues or concerns they have regarding your products.
This way, you can improve your products and services to deliver delightful customer experiences. The best way to leverage business intelligence in retail is via software tools.
Power BI is an excellent data visualization software that can dig deep into the customer, market, organizational, and business data to discover the most compelling retail visuals.
The data generated from them are interactive in nature and highly secure, so you don’t have to worry about the safety and security of your data resources. You can connect these software tools to multiple data sources and tap into all your customer segments with its interactive and intuitive retail dashboards.
What makes the entire endeavor so amazing is the fact that you can generate data-intensive reports from a combination of dashboards with different kinds of visualizations that are relevant to particular business areas.
So, business intelligence has all the arms in its arsenal to drive a critical transformation in a retail business scenario via data visualization and business intelligence.
Shown below, is how the entire process comes out to be:
While the infographic is highly engaging and granular, it can be a bit overwhelming, especially for beginners who are just taking the first steps towards digital transformation and business intelligence.
Hence, we explore the various benefits of using business intelligence for retail in the next section.
Business intelligence finds many applications in retail, ranging from learning about your customers to employees. Using BI tools, you can identify the major issues that are ailing your supply chain efficiency and resolve them. Further, BI tools offer smart data visualization to help you make the most of your organizational data.
Digital shoppers are smart, more perceptive, and look beyond the reward points and discounts when it comes to customer service and experiences. Retail analytics dashboards help you gain visibility into customer insights and purchase patterns.
You can leverage the predictive analytics and identify their shopping predictions to scale effectively alongside your customer demands.
You can identify, adapt, and deliver across the ever-evolving needs of your customers, and that too across all channels. As you have a 360-degree view of your customers’ expectations and requirements, you can deliver across all of them, thereby ensuring that you streamline the entire customer journey instead of standalone touchpoints.
You can personalize your customer interactions on every channel and deliver proactive customer service and support in an omnichannel manner.
Business intelligence tools allow you to use hundreds of data connectors for combining Petabytes of data from external and internal data sources. Hence, you can have data-rich and cohesive customer insights that are reliable as well as intuitive.
Your employees are your core strength no matter what level of automation you have in your organization, or what size your retail setup is. Hence, it is important to empower your employees with the right tools for collaboration, data analytics, customer intelligence, and business operations.
All these retail insights are data-rich and actionable. So, your management or analysts don’t have to spend hours making sense of the huge blocks of data they have. They can easily figure out the next course of action with highly intuitive retail KPIs dashboards.
They can easily export and share this data in various formats for real-time collaboration and presentation to take business decisions in an agile manner. What makes the entire process so awesome is the fact that the insights can be implemented without any doubt, as they are stemming from exhaustive data processing and not from any third-party market research data.
Further, your employees have 360-degree customer profiles that have all the contextual, behavioral, and interaction information they might need to form a wholesome opinion about a new strategy or marketing decision.
The retail industry is inseparable from supply chains that are inherently inefficient with data silos and fragmented components. Using business intelligence in retail, you can also steer your supply chains towards transformation.
You can get the right product at the right price and deliver the same to the right customer at the right time without succumbing to the inefficiencies of the supply chains. Data analytics empowers the supply chains by incorporating different elements, such as IoT, automation, online documentation, and sensors.
Thus, you can close the gap between customer demands and fulfillment like never before. You can reduce your operational costs and unlock operational efficiencies by enhancing end-to-end agility.
Using data-driven retailing insights and retail visuals, you can improve your logistics transparency and speed to market as well.
Retail business intelligence accelerates your retail innovation, operational agility, and enhances your overall resilience. Thus, you can steer your business towards sustainable growth irrespective of the market shifts and technological disruptions.
With rich insights from business intelligence software, you can refine your business strategies and build a forward-looking smart retail strategy driven by the machine learning, AI, and visualization capabilities the software offers.
You can identify the unplanned challenges and mitigate them well ahead of time by transforming your business model from being reactive to a proactive one.
This spurs ground-level organizational transformation via a strong data culture that keeps pace with ever-changing customer demands.
Now that we have had a detailed overview of the various benefits of business intelligence in the retail industry, let us move on to the next and more crucial part.
While all of us can agree that business intelligence is an excellent tool for leveraging analytics in retail, one question remains unanswered – how to start?
There is no doubt that there are many data visualization tools available, that are simple to use and extremely intuitive, and interactive. But, to make the most of your business intelligence efforts, you need to approach it in the right manner.
We recommend opting for a reputed business intelligence consulting company where the consultants can not only help you get started but also with making the most of your endeavors.
At Datatobiz, we help retail companies to make the most of their intelligence and data analytics efforts with on-point business intelligence consulting.
Our data analytics experts and consultants come with a rich and cross-industry experience and help you identify the best processes and business pain points to start with. We help you scale, innovate and overcome your challenges in retail and beyond.
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