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COMBATING THE DATA GAP WITH THE NEW RETAIL FRONTIER

Published: Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Information Technology (IT)Retail Consumer Affairs

As industries the world over strive to keep pace with technological advancements, the retail industry has engaged with “omni-channels” (multiple operational channels). This creates more data, delivers more engagement from customers, and draws from more data sources. Through social engagement and the Internet of Things, a greater understanding of customers and their needs can be fostered - if this mass of data from all channels is harnessed correctly.

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    As industries the world over strive to keep pace with technological advancements, the retail industry has engaged with “omni-channels” (multiple operational channels). This creates more data, delivers more engagement from customers, and draws from more data sources. Through social engagement and the Internet of Things, a greater understanding of customers and their needs can be fostered - if this mass of data from all channels is harnessed correctly.  

    A key challenge facing retail is how to make sense of huge multiple data sources, without ignoring any of the data flowing into the business. “Every piece of information gathered means something – but its meaning must be correctly interpreted through reliable, timeous and effective analytics if it is to be of any use,” states Jane Thomson, Managing Director at South Africa Qlik Master Reseller.

    The ability to integrate these multiple data sources offers indispensable insights. According to Paul Winsor, Director of Retail and Services Market Development for Qlik; “This data allows you to understand new behaviours, new customer insights, the way that customers are shopping, and the way that stock is being managed inside your organisation. The key to achieving this is integrating the information and being able to draw visual analytics to reach a greater understanding.”

    Three data aspects are critical to success in a retail business. The key performance indicators of sales, stock and waste are standard and have been measured for as long as retailers have been trading. However, Winsor believes that, today, the customer journey must be understood. “Customer behaviour illustrates the entire customer journey (from their interactions to their consideration of buying something, their decision-making process, their purchasing decision, and what they do after they’ve purchased) which is a key component to understanding any retail business today.” The third component is outside influences, including micro and macro environmental factors impacting on business success.

    As innovation in technology continues to offer business benefits, retailers have the potential to achieve significant value from analytics. Numerous datasets can now be captured, stored and analysed offering valuable insights and progressive competitive advantage. “The advancement of mobile is enabling us to put analytics into everyone’s hands,” confirms Winsor. “With the application of the right software, retailers are starting to use analytics right up to the outer edges of their organisation, from customer facing employees to supply chain staff. It’s important that it’s a platform that allows you to feel that you can access that information and make proactive decisions, and Qlik is doing that with many of its customers today.”

    The four keys to overcoming the data challenges in retail businesses include: integration; the association of multiple data sources; the visualisation of the results; and effectively sharing the information. Through Qlik, retailers are empowered to integrate multiple data sources, experience true associative power, visualise the data in a way that makes it easy to make informed decisions, and use cloud and mobile to get the data out to every person in the organisation.

    To Winsor, data analytics and sharing shouldn’t be confined to management functions. He believes the further the data goes throughout an organisation, the greater the positive momentum will be. “This is something that all employees should be involved in. When it comes to analytics, when it comes to information, the wider you spread the data inside your organisation, the better decisions are going to be made.”

    On the 28th of July, 2017, Qlik held a conference featuring analytical solutions for the retail industry. At the conference, held at Century City in Cape Town, Winsor delivered a keynote address and put forward his prediction for retail’s new frontier. This prediction hinges on three key data-driven elements: understanding everything about the empowered consumer; facilitating the modern supply chain, complete with home deliveries and extended returns policies; and the changing role of the store, where employees are better able to deliver excellent service through intelligent data insights.

    “These are the three fundamental retail focus areas that are fundamental to retail business. It’s still about the customer, but it’s all about understanding everything about their behaviour as well as their transactions. It’s still about supply chain, but it’s now going right to the outside with the product going out of the business, and back to the returns with products coming into the business. It’s still about the store, but it’s focussing on how the employee role is changing with the power of data in their hands,” concludes Winsor. “That’s my future for the new retail frontier.”

     

    Issued by Perfect Word Consulting (Pty) Ltd

    Raynique Ducie; perfectword@trinitas.co.za

     

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    About Qlik  

    Qlik® delivers intuitive platform solutions for self-service data visualization, guided analytics applications, embedded analytics and reporting to approximately 40,000 customers worldwide. Companies of all sizes, across all industries and geographies, use Qlik® solutions to visualize and explore information, generate insight and make better decisions. At Qlik, we optimize Business Intelligence (BI) by harnessing the collective intelligence of people across an organization. We focus on empowering people—by enabling everyone in an organization to see the whole story that lives within their data.

     

    About South Africa Qlik Master Reseller

    South Africa Qlik Master Reseller (previously known as QlikView SA) has been a member of the EOH group of companies since 1 July 2014, facilitating a great partnership that aims to accelerate growth for Qlik in Southern Africa directly or through its specialized Partner channel.  SA Qlik MR’s portfolio of products meets customers' growing needs from reporting and self-service visual analysis to guided, embedded and custom analytics. Over 1800 customers rely on Qlik solutions to gain meaning out of information from varied sources, exploring the hidden relationships within data that lead to insights that ignite good ideas.

    These solutions bridge the gap between traditional BI solutions and inadequate spreadsheet applications. The in-memory associative search technology that Qlik pioneered, pioneered the self-service BI category, allowing users to explore information freely rather than being confined to a predefined path of questions. Appropriate from SMB to the largest global enterprise, Qlik’s self-service analysis can be deployed with data governance in days or weeks. The platform’s app-driven model works with existing BI solutions, offering an immersive mobile and social, collaborative experience. Headquartered in Radnor, Pennsylvania, Qlik does business in more than 100 countries with over 40,000 customers globally. For more information, please visit www.saqlik.com.