Big Data is Transforming the Retail Industry
Retailers have experienced seismic changes last decade with their ways to engage the customers. People used to only go to brick-and-mortar stores to shop. Now it is the age of omni-channels from stores to ecommerce sites and mobile devices. Customers are also more active and vocal than ever to let their opinion known to their fellow shoppers and retailers through social media sites such as Yelp. This presents huge challenges and opportunities to retailers as an enormous amount of data have been collected and can be analyzed to gain critical insights to support retailers in their endeavors for product innovation, personalized customer experience, cross-channel merchandizing and efficient inventory management. Big Data is a perfect solution to address these challenges, providing the retailers who are forward looking and investing in the technology great competitive advantages.
challenges
Retail is a highly competitive and thin-margin industry. Customers are becoming more and more sophisticated in how they spend their money. Retailers are facing multitude of challenges to capture large market share and retain customers’ loyalty.
- Retailers need to be able to anticipate demand, ensure availability of products in the right locations, price the merchandise optimally, attract customers by offering relevant and timely promotions and enhance customer experience with personalized customer services
- Retailers need to provide a uniform, yet customized, shopping experience across multiple channels such as stores, online and mobile for cross selling and enhanced customer experience
- Retailers need to know their customers in a holistic fashion in regards to their shopping patterns, product preference, money spent, demographics and past shopping experience
- Retailers need to be in tune with the market trend and manage its inventory and supply chain to ensure that the right merchandising is available at the right time and right location
To meet these challenges, retailers need to mash up content and data from many disparate data sources, internal and external, and provide an actionable insights for the business to act on. The sheer volume of the data, large variety and uncertain veracity of the content make it a perfect use case for Big Data. Traditional business intelligence technologies just fall short of dealing with these challenges. Built upon its extensive experience with the retail industry, PREDICTif has developed an innovative set of Big Data technologies to address those challenges to gain critical information, without burdening business users with hard-to-use tools or high IT costs. We are able to accomplish this by Partnering with the leading information discovery and big data technology company Oracle, by delivering highly customized solutions based on Oracle Big Data Discovery (BDD) and Endeca Information Discovery (OEID) technologies. These solutions are described in the below table:
| What | Why | Who |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing and Consumer Engagement |
|
Pinpont the customers that will likely buy through social media, purchase history, customer forums, demographic data, browsing patterns and customer loyalty data |
| Store Operations and Cross-channel Commerce |
|
Determine the right inventory at the right locations for the right channels through trend prediction by analyzing industry news, web browsing patterns, social media and enterprise data |
| Product Innovation |
|
Create product bundles based on customer transactions, shopping patterns, demographic data, research data and local buzz and make relevant recommendations to customers |
| Consumer Engagement |
|
Segment customers according to expected buying behavior and then contact them as they wish to be reached, when they are in the right location or they are engaged with personalized real-time offers |
Equipped with our long history of successes with the retail industry, PREDICTif will deliver these value-added retail analytics solutions to enable our retail customers to capitalize on the big data solutions. Our engagement will start with a Retail Industry expert who will help produce a solution roadmap based on our pre-built templates and then deploy an implementation team that consists of highly skilled consultants to establish Big Data solutions for consumer insights. PREDICTif has helped transformed retail organizations to gain competitive advantages over their market rivals and achieve significantly high return on investment.