How to harness retail analytics for increased instore

How to Harness Retail Analytics for Increased In­Store Productivity

Big data is changing the world of retail. Collecting, analyzing and reading data about customers and their shopping habits is now crucial for the world of online retail. But what about conventional stores with fixed costs and physical locations to service? Can retail analytics help these enterprises to turn their businesses around and even flourish? The answer is, yes, of course they can, if they harness retail analytics properly.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know at exactly which point in your store triggered a decision to buy or to leave? This is what retail analytics can do for you. By integrating multiple sources of information, such as live video feeds, RFID employee tags, point­of­sale systems and customer surveys, traditional stores can leverage the enormous amount of data to provide concrete benefits for their businesses. These benefits can include reductions in theft and fraud, increased sales and increased store traffic.

Imagine if you could learn exactly how many customers were in your store, what parts of the store they were exploring and on what days? What would that do for your business? Combined with information from point­of­sale systems, this could mean you would know what customers saw that convinced them to buy certain items. Leveraging this data with other information from, say, a tracking system can help you generate increased sales by moving best­selling items to other parts of the store with more traffic.

Let’s take this a step further. How can we apply this concept to your staffing concerns?

Employee productivity is a major concern for most stores. With retail analytics, you could use staffing schedules combined with point­of­sale data to determine what employees are the most productive in which departments. What could that do for your business? Identifying the most productive, the least productive and every employee in­between can help devise new schedules to take advantage of the best employees while giving the not­so­good employees opportunities to improve.

To sum this up, there is an entire world of information that exists right there inside your store that you may not have previously been able to harness and analyze. Using these techniques, your store can take advantage of new technology to radically improve your bottom line, employee morale and customer loyalty. Retail analytics can help you do all this and so much more.