Framework:
Retailers are faced with tremendous challenges to stay viable and competitive. They need to make use of all the tools at their disposal to operate more efficiently and increase revenue. One of the ways to increase revenue in retail is to have new customers buy your product or service. Duh… sounds easy, right? Not really. Accomplishing this in today’s ever-changing markets is no easy fit; it is becoming increasingly more difficult as retailers are subject to pressure from different angles. Diversification of sales channels, shifting customer demands, globalization, e-commerce, the mobile wave, Internet of Things, are just a few. These present retailers with new and different challenges but also offer opportunities for growth, expansion, and most of all, evolution. Faced with all these challenges and opportunities retailers need information management solutions that allow them to make better, more informed decisions in real-time.
Pandera Systems combines the latest Analytics and Business Intelligence technologies along with the best consultants in the industry to guide you and serve as your trusted advisor and SME so you can evolve and adapt to the new Retail market landscape by acquiring and, most of all, retaining new customers. Pandera takes a holistic approach that is often overlooked by most consulting firms: customer service is key. Pandera’s Retail Solutions help businesses attract customers through providing the best customer service by analyzing, quantifying, and monetizing three specific factors: clienteling, inventory management, and a knowledgeable workforce.
Evolving and reinventing your business requires taking a retrospective look and seeing what has worked best. Sometimes this means going back to basics: convincing potential patrons to buy from you. This is called Customer Acquisition and it requires convincing a potential customer to buy your product or service. Aside from the cost associated with this effort which includes marketing spend (often an ethereal measure), vendor costs, store overhead, and costs associated with store associate wages, there are many other factors involved in driving new customers into your business which are difficult, in some cases, impossible to calculate. Pandera Systems has identified and helped businesses with concrete challenges and sound data-driven solutions.
Challenge #1 – Omnichannel sales:
Retail transactions take place across many different channels: online, mobile, direct mail, or in person. The days of only in-store shopping are long gone, and retailers now have many more opportunities to interact with customers – and so does the competition. While online shopping has garnered the most attention, consumers are also utilizing TV shopping networks, airport retail, direct mail, and other non-traditional channels. Beyond the actual purchases, multi-channel retailing involves all interactions between retailers and customers, including product research, comparison, and inquiries. Consumers might research products through one channel and then make their purchases through another. This creates many new opportunities for retailers to reach consumers, but it also adds incredible complexity to retailers’ efforts to understand consumer behavior and effectively target their marketing strategies. The proliferation of e-tail, among other factors, has also greatly increased consumer knowledge and demands. The Internet has made product information and purchasing much more easily available to consumers, making them more discerning and powerful buyers.
Solution – Clienteling:
Know your customer! The solution for today’s retailer, a strong understanding of their customer base, can be the difference between success and failure. As business becomes increasingly digital, blurring the line between physical and online boundaries, digitally-savvy customers expect a consistent and personalized experience at every touchpoint. More than ever, today’s customers expect a predictable, frictionless, and personalized multi-channel customer experience. That’s why, to be successful, retailers must first build a unified view of customers—a non-trivial endeavor that can be expensive and quite complex.
Pandera Systems takes advantage of diversification of sales channels to give retailers opportunities for growth and expansion. By utilizing the latest data integration, advanced analytics, machine learning, and data mining technologies and encapsulating those into mobile devices, Pandera empowers retailers to take an omnichannel approach and know the customer before they get to the store. This provides retailers with a 360-degree view of the customer. Using advanced analytics, we craft accurate dashboards with effective visualizations that provide retailers with insights to make sense of customer data from various touchpoints for real-time decisions that have a direct impact on profit margins. With these Analytics, retailers can create more targeted promotions, tailor store assortments to specific clientele, and create superior, personalized shopping experiences for customers at all stages of the buying cycle. Our Retail Solution enables retailers to create reports, dashboards, and applications that track in-house promotions, display market basket analysis, and encourage competition between vendors for limited shelf space.
Challenge #2 – Inventory management:
$1.1 trillion per year is the global overstock and out-of-stock cost for retailers. If a customer doesn’t find what they are looking for in your store they are 98% likely to never come back.
Solution – Effective Pricebook management and Market Basket Affinity:
Pandera’s Retail Solution provides retailers with effective inventory management that provide optimal levels of merchandise inventory. For most retailers, market basket affinity is a well-known tool for cross-promotions and marketing. Using data science techniques such as Machine Learning, and Analytics to surface data science findings, we provide the means to analyze customer patterns from weblogs, purchase history, and promotions to identify and predict item affinity. This valuable insight enables them to better manage their promotions and other activities such as price planning. Whether it is weblogs from NoSQL databases that track user browsing patterns, or transaction and loyalty history from a relational database, Pandera provides insights from data across multiple sources to holistically analyze this information. Retail weblogs stored in Big Data sources such as Google Cloud’s Cloud SQL, Cloud BigTable or Cloud FIrestore, can be seamlessly blended with other conformed data such as purchase history, promotional information, and even customer product feedback received in stores. Retailers can then identify affinity items and related subcategories for a specific customer. The propensity to purchase items can be easily identified via dashboards or ad-hoc data discovery. With this sequential affinity analysis, retailers can send specific and timely mobile marketing or live online recommendations with bundled promotions that will drive traffic and increase revenue. Additionally, retailers can take advantage of real-time analytics to optimize inventory, generate promotions, and adjust campaigns on the fly to increase effectiveness.
Challenge #3 – Associate product knowledge:
86% of customers would pay more for a better experience but only 29% find sales associates knowledgeable and helpful. Real-time data streaming in the hands of customer facing associates will be one of the main drivers for the retail industry comeback.
Solution – Mobilized workforce:
Pandera’s Retail Mobile Solution helps store associates improve customer experience by providing knowledgeable assistance and recommendations. By mobilizing your workforce with our suite of Mobile solutions, associates can improve their one-on-one customer interaction and establish a trusting relationship by sharing the latest product information, offering upsell and cross selling opportunities, and personalizing the shopping experience with tailored offers and promotions. Pandera Systems Retail Solutions provide customers data in real time, allowing store associates to better target customers with relevant recommendations and information, resulting in a higher conversion rate. Associates also have endless aisle access, enabling them to share cross-channel product information to convert shoppers from single-channel customers to omnichannel brand advocates
Summary:
Retail is more competitive than ever before. Lack of effective data-driven insights lead to missed opportunities a year of $1.2B. Customer service is key. Don’t email customers. Mobile app them. No one checks emails anymore, but one almost always checks every mobile phone notifications throughout the day. Our retail solutions help retailers remove boundaries between channels, be it mobile, online, or in-store shopping. By taking a holistic approach to retailing, we provide solutions that streamline the time to insight by delivering best in class SSBI allowing the business to react almost immediately to customer behavior. When it comes to retail, Pandera’s Retail Solution does not look at aggregates but instead empower businesses to look at customers as individuals. Retailers struggle to obtain a 360-degree view of their customers and fail to truly understand their customers’ unique profiles. Our suite of Retail Solutions make it quick and easy to make sense of customer data from various touchpoints for real-time decisions that have a direct impact on profit margins. With this data, retailers can create more targeted promotions, tailor store assortments to specific clientele, and create a superior, personalized shopping experience for customers at all stages of the buying cycle.
Pandera Retail Solutions enable retailers to create reports, dashboards, and applications that track in-house promotions, display market basket analysis, and give our clients an edge over the competition. Retail analysts are able to determine customer profiles based on factors such as gender, age, and purchase history to appropriately group customers for marketing programs. Data discovery and effective SSBI enables retail analysts to drag and drop attributes and metrics as they analyze shopping patterns to accurately create and assign customer segments or develop loyalty programs for targeted campaigns. With Pandera’s data science and advanced analytics capabilities, retailers can distinguish groups of customers from one another to offer personalized product recommendations or discounts to strengthen customer retention and increase loyalty. Pandera’s solutions empower retailers to visualize ever-changing customer trends and demands, and then adapt to those changes in various functions of their organization such as marketing, real estate, and merchandise assortment planning. With Panderas’s retail solutions offering, retailers can be predictive and prescriptive in nature, empowering them to become even more closely in tune with their customer needs.