The retail industry is undergoing a revolutionary change powered by digital technology. The shopper is now clearly in charge, enabled by technology to shop however, wherever and whatever thus driving changes in shopping behaviour.

The traditional model ‘business as usual’ has giving its place to unprecedented change in order to better serve ever more demanding shoppers and enhance customer experience.

KEY TRENDS IN RETAIL

Experience shopping

Consumers are turning their backs to boring shopping. It’s all about the experience and not just the product. Shoppers will continue to visit a physical shop as long as there is something interesting to see, something new to learn, something that will entertain them. Retailers that realize this and adapt to new retail models will thrive.

Conscious customer

Customers are more conscious than ever and will continue to be as buying decisions are based on factors other than price. The generation of millennials are taking the lead in this but are also influencing generations before and after them. Customers are now demanding attributes such as authenticity and uniqueness in the products they buy and honesty and integrity in their transactions. Ethics is also an issue which matters even more.

Mobile retailing

Shopping with the use of a mobile device such as smartphone, tablet has grown within the past years and expected to rapidly continue its growth. Mobile devices are also being used for various shopping related activities. Customers are searching for better prices ‘on the spot’, searching for the availability of a specific product in-store fast and easy, locating the desired shop nearby and much more. 

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Retailers are starting to realize the benefits of AI and ML in order to better serve their customers, attract new customers, expand their business. Chatbots which can easily manage customer queries and make targeted purchase recommendations, voice assistants which can quickly answer routine questions are just some examples of the use of AI and ML which can bring value to retail business.

Omni-channel retailing

Omni-channel retailing goes beyond multichannel retailing. It is more than a product or service being available in various channels offline and online. Omni-channel retailing is a fully integrated and inter-wired approach to commerce. It is a philosophy about providing consistent, unique and relevant brand experiences across and within multiple customer touchpoints which include in-store, e-commerce, mobile, social media. This allows shoppers to purchase fast, simple, everywhere and anytime in a way that is in line with the channels they use and their customer profile.

SERVICES

The digit revolution has resulted in an explosive increase in the generation of data with great volume, velocity and variety. Μore data has been created worldwide in the past 5 years than in the entire previous history. Billions of gigabytes of data are being created each day in many types, both structured and unstructured.

The need for data analytics is more imperative than ever in order to explore massive sets of structured and unstructured data, to uncover hidden patterns, trends, insights and more useful business information.

Pricing Analytics

INESIS can help you increase your profit and market share by defining and maintaining a well-structured pricing strategy. With the use of advanced analytical techniques INESIS can effectively perform:

  • Price optimization: The question ‘How much is a client willing to pay for a product at a given period?’ is addressed by analysing data related to the competition, inventory levels, pricing history and market changes.
  • Promotion effectiveness and planning:  Advanced analytical techniques are used to understand promotion effects and reveal key drivers of their effectiveness which can assist in planning future promotions and price changing. Customer’s behaviour can also reveal interesting insights that can assist in the planning of targeted promotional offers.
  • Identify Price Opportunities for Quick Wins: Most companies have significant opportunities for price improvement waiting to be revealed within their data. INESIS uses descriptive and diagnostic tools to uncover price misalignments or under-priced products
  • Competitive Intelligence Analytics: INESIS can help you to make strategic decisions that will keep you ahead of your competition. We can gather, analyse, interpret and visualize any type of external data related to your business and turn it into intelligence.

Customer behavior analytics

Customer behaviour analytics is about understanding how your customers act across each channel and interaction point (digital or non-digital), what influences their actions, their buying habits and lifestyle preferences.  However, customers today interact with companies through multiple interaction points — mobile, social media, stores, e-commerce sites and more. This dramatically increases the complexity and variety of customer data available, thus making customer behaviour analytics a necessity.

INESIS can assist you in optimizing the entire customer lifecycle at all four phases:

  • Customer acquisition: How can you acquire new customers? Behaviour analytics and study of behaviour patterns can target high-value customers, channels to find them and best potential offers to acquire them. Understanding ways to lower acquisition costs are also determined.
  • Customer engagement: How can you drive more activity with the acquired customer and increase purchase value and rate? Behaviour patterns and behavioural customer segmentation can determine personalized next-best, cross-sell and up-sell offers as well as more general customer marketing offers.
  • Customer retention: How can you retain customers for the long run? Detecting patterns that may lead to churn and identifying when they are occurring so as to reach out to customers and propose to them next-best offers to keep them.
  • Customer loyalty: How can you maintain customers loyalty? Analytics are used to understand how to motivate customers, offers that help them purchase and maintain a lifetime value with you.

Applying customer behaviour analytics can positively impact your business in more ways than you can imagine. Understanding customer behaviour can:

  • increase customer acquisition and conversion rates
  • lower costs of acquisition
  • increase average sale on initial purchases
  • increase order sizes on repeat purchases
  • increase the number of purchases per customer
  • low the costs of sale and service
  • increase customer retention and lower customer churn

Store location analysis

Using advanced geospatial analytics INESIS can help retailers:

  • quantify the true economic value of each of their stores. An omni-channel approach to store performance examines the interaction between offline and online customer journeys and purchases. This allows each store to get credit for the sales in which it played a role in, regardless of whether the actual purchase happened online or offline.
  • decide where to open a new store taking into consideration demographics, market condition, where your target group hangs out

Assortment localization analytics

Advanced clustering and customer behaviour measurement techniques at different locations and channels can reveal interesting insights regarding optimal assortment and thus maximize your profits.

Inventory analytics

Inventory analytics can help you to reduce expenses on inventory and ensure that stock converts to sales and not sunk costs. We can help you forecast the right inventory at the right locations and in the right quantities.