Solutions for Retail

The world's leading retailers turn to business intelligence (BI) to:

• Improve purchasing, forecasting, and distribution management
• Optimize product profitability, dramatically increase effectiveness, and reduce marketing campaign costs
• Identify and segment customers to enable retention strategies
• Integrate management and financial reporting to improve performance
• Reduce and control operational costs through optimized store performance
• Effectively service customers throughout the multichannel network

Customer Profiling and Campaign Management

Business gains from marketing come from diverse sources. Though many retailers achieve ROI (and ROM) relatively easily by pursuing common sources of business gain, it's with a first use of analytics that the rapid returns start coming in.

Areas that often provide a high and immediate ROI include:

• Customer segmentation. Identify specific groups of customers by loyalty program status, demographics, recency/frequency/value, brand loyalty, and other dimensions so you can promote to them more effectively.
• Personalized upselling/cross-selling. Automatically recommend to customers (or store associates serving customers) additional or higher-margin products based on the product under consideration and historic data on that particular customer.
• Promotion optimization. Accurately forecast the sales lift that a specific promotion will have and then balance the combination of sales lift and net margin to optimize return on that promotion.
• Multi-channel customer service. Enable customers to easily order online and pick up or make returns to stores. Understand your best customers' online, store, catalog, and total behavior.
• New store location. Identify the characteristics of your best-performing stores and identify new locations that fit those criteria.
• Loyalty program development. Develop and manage new loyalty program features that differentiate your program from others. Then measure their effectiveness and ROM.
• Low-cost email marketing. Use highly targeted email campaigns, which are automatically personalized to each customer, to add value. Personalization increases both the effectiveness of each campaign and the volume of customers opting to receive emails.

Vendor Performance Management

Too often, vendor shipments arrive short, and with substitutions, or are late - resulting in back-ordering of products without confirmation. This causes lost sales, lost margin, frustrated and potentially lost customers, and extra work.

To minimize such repeating problems, some retailers are engaging in vendor performance management and collaborating with vendors over the internet. These retailers are giving vendor executives access to their information so the vendor knows how to serve them better to become or remain a preferred vendor. Vendors get access to the same performance measures used by buyers so the vendors see where performance improvements will be most fruitful.