It’s no secret that as a retailer, you’re continuously searching for ways to increase sales and improve customer retention, after all, it’s this same drive that ensures the efficient daily running of your business. It’s no wonder then that more and more businesses are increasingly turning to business intelligence tools in order to gain new insights about their customer’s behaviour.
New data can assist greatly in driving good business decisions, providing a way of working that values business decisions backed up by verified and analysed data. However, many businesses are struggling to harvest/mine the data they collect, making the analysis of which equally challenging.
As a business owner, only you can collect the data you require, be it customer information, buying patterns, web activity etc. And this data needs to be good, as only then will the analysis and findings be worthwhile and prepare you to make successful strategic decisions based on your new insight.
What Insights Can Be Discovered from Good Data?
1.Gain a Single View of the Truth
Single Version of the Truth (SVOT); the data warehousing ideal of having a single centralised database, which stores all your data in a consistent and efficient way, is easily attainable when integrating with all sales channels, CRM, warehouse, inventory and supply chain via a single system.
Such a single, centralised system such as Vardells Warehouse Connect, can ensure you are making decisions based on a singular version of the truth, ensuring you are better equipped to maintain a competitive edge through business intelligence, and thereby standing you in good stead to maintain control and visibility across your entire business.
2.Determine Detailed Sales Trends
Business intelligence enables companies to determine detailed sales trends based on a number of useful insights, such as their customers’ preferences, reactions to promotions, online shopping experiences, purchasing habits, and patterns and trends which affect sales.
Leveraging such consumer buying habits means you can decide the best course of action to take in retaining your most valuable customers, and in taking advantage of missed sales opportunities.
Such comprehensive insight means retailers can swiftly decide which link-sell opportunities to increase and/or which products are most suitable for cross-selling. With such a clear picture of sales trends, this also enables collaboration in marketing and management decision-making.
3.Measure Business Performance
To compete successfully, retailers must shift their focus towards growth drivers such as attracting more customers, increasing order value, reducing cart abandonment rates, launching new products and expanding into more markets.
But this is simply unachievable if their time and resources are spent on manual back office processes like fulfilling orders, updating accounts, managing reordering and updating inventory levels. The answer? Valuable insight to feed good business decisions.
Fast access via a solution such as Vardells Retail Connect, to valuable insights can mean efficient, real-time interaction with your data, giving you a detailed map of what’s happening now and how well you’re performing, along with business analytics, which can be used to measure business performance to find and forecast trends in sales, turnover and growth.
4.Observe Future Financial Status
Business intelligence can also offer an up-to-date view of a company’s financial picture. From profit and loss, general ledger, and balance sheet figures, to allowing organisations to view individual transactions in order to get immediate answers to cost concerns and revenue opportunities. By exploring incoming and outgoing finances of the present and past, retailers can make decisions based on the company’s future financial status.
5.Benefit from a Business-Wide Vision
Making the best decisions on pricing, reordering, discounting and customer service requires instant visibility across the entire business and an aggregated view of all orders, inventory, purchasing, accounting and more, all in a single system.
Business intelligence, combined with a variety of applications that can each communicate with each other via a single system, means as a business owner, you can gain an overall view of your business and the ability to correlate and compare data in new ways.
This unified approach to business helps to gain a much-needed business-wide vision, whilst encouraging innovation and preventing that data silos that’s present in so many companies today.
Do you Have the Right Tools to Support your Retail Operations?
It’s every retailer’s responsibility to ensure the customer is more than just satisfied with their shopping experience.
A retail management system such as Vardells Retail Connect can help by integrating an organisation’s most needed systems i.e. POS, CRM, Inventory Management etc. into a single framework, providing a Single Version of the Truth (SVOT).
At Vardells, our Retail Connect retail management system provides our customers with all the data they need to make good business decisions, with integrated capability and instant access to account, channel, product, pricing and supplier performance data.
For more information about Retail Connect and how it can help you to make better business decisions, please get in touch.
