The retail industry is under relentless pressure to meet sales targets, especially since the last few decades. The sturdy rise of eCommerce and mCommerce platforms is supposedly the factors for this situation. But the retail sector, like other industries, is undergoing a major transformation, getting a much-needed improvement in the form of newer technologies.
In this domain, understanding customer’s behavior, attitude, requirements, and pain points are important for success. The right data at the right time can help make informed and data-driven decisions. And adopting a business intelligence solution is a powerful way to work towards retail goals.
Giving the features of business intelligence and data management services a face-lift, paired with the proficiency of analytics and data integration, a transformation in the retail business intelligence solution is what this industry needs.
Why Power BI
Retail industries handle massive amounts of information – from supplier data to customer’s buying pattern, employee information to inventory particulars – every interaction and every data point offers an occasion to make the retail business more competent and successful.
Power BI can record these data points and generate actionable insights for effectively targeting customers through personalization. As a business owner, you will want your retail store to achieve higher sales, reduce costs related to operations and customer acquisition and deliver outstanding customer experiences. With an effective Business Intelligence working as your aid, it becomes easier.
Managing multiple locations
As a business owner, if you open new stores across towns and cities, it means that your business is booming. While new stores represent wonderful opportunities to reach a much larger customer base, they also present a pressing challenge: each of these outlets must maintain the brand’s reputation and deliver the uncompromising service to every client.
And seeing how dynamic the industry is, there is no scope for problems to lurk around. When something is not working the way it should, it should be immediately fixed.
With Power BI, you can bid adieu to the incessant spreadsheets and static reports and welcome the new-age interactive data analytics. You can benefit from reporting and analytics, and discover distinct trends in sales, regulations, inventory, and margins in each location, and improve your processes across all your stores.
With this BI solution, you can get an insight into why some of your stores are underperforming, or why customers are not buying certain products at a store despite the offers and discounts, and then the required steps to rectify the situations.
Changing customer trends
Customer demands have significantly changed in the past few years. They are more aware of their needs and they read and do thorough research (thanks to the plethora of new-age reviewers) about the products they want to buy. The focal point is now information and they want all of this in real-time.
To maximize the potential of your stores, you must meet these requirements to attract new customers and retain the loyalty of your old ones. It also needs insights to hone sales efforts. So, how do you go about it? It has been proven long ago that the human brain can process images much faster than text.
Visuals work on various levels within an organization and lead to insightful answers, making data visualization a core component of any business. Power BI enriches your reports with colorful, insightful and customizable dashboards for better and quick decisions.
You don’t have to spend hours trying to figure out the patterns of customer’s buying nature, it all comes to you in a jiffy. And based on that your sales and marketing teams can get their heads together to create an effective campaign to woo more clients for you.
Several data points
It’s common knowledge that a retail outlet has way too many data points. The burning question here is, how many are being used? The data stored in several places and various formats are most likely to be fragmented between structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.
Your stores will have biometric scanners, POS systems, CRM software, mobile apps, and each point generates huge amounts of data. They have the potential of providing you with new business opportunities and a chance to give your ROI a boost. Now with so many data points and so much information, you can choose to depend on the Excel spreadsheets or go with Power BI.
Excel sheets no doubt have been in the market for a very long time and have their own fan following, but if you want to spend several hours in a day shuffling between reports to find that one piece of information, then they are for you. Power BI eliminates the wastage of time and energy and lets you view exactly what you need.
Excel sheet analysis will give you a basic understanding, help you to understand a few strictures of your business or it might just throw you in a numerical abyss. Bad or inaccurate analysis can lead to a lot of rework or even inappropriate decisions, which can have serious consequences.
Compete with excellence and overcome challenges
Being an entrepreneur, you would want your sales team to achieve their targets and your stores doing well along with remarkable customer service. You want to stay ahead in the game and be better off than your competitors.
To get an idea of where you stand in this competitive terrain, you can either spend hours hunched over catalogs and marketing paraphernalia or take advantage of a retail business intelligence solution- Power BI. With access to advanced reports, you can benchmark the performance of your products against those of your competitors, conduct predictive analysis, and fine-tune pricing, discounts, offers, and assortments accordingly.
You can optimize costs, increase profitability, use the right information to your benefit, at the right time and leave everyone behind. With Power BI you can solve many of the hurdles that you encounter daily.
You can get broad insights into customer trends and behaviors, assess your competition, enhance your supply chain and benchmark one well-performing store against another while augmenting all of them at the same time. You can also govern the right time and amount for a discount or an offer.
It’s a great time to be in the race for being the best. With the market exploding with new technologies and novel business strategies, you want to remain ahead.
However, at times, navigating and implementing new software can be slightly challenging and instead of spending resources on rework and fixing mistakes, it’s better to reach out for assistance from an experienced technical partner.
Connect with us for us to evaluate your exclusive business needs and strategizing a data-driven plan for a perfect Power BI implementation and use.
Author’s bio:
Mohona is a Content Writer for the Marketing team in AhaApps since 2019. When she is not busy attending to her creative, technical side, she likes to binge on sitcoms on Netflix. She loves writing poems and reading short stories when she wants to break away from the humdrum of life.