1For any business, the key success factor relies on its ability for finding the relevant information at the right time. In this digital world, it has become further crucial for the retailers to be aware of what decisions should be made, and how they will impact their financial and operational performances. The growing demand for these insights has kindled the growth of Big Data in retail industry. Today, the retailers are considering the Big Data and Analytics as the game changing path for their businesses in attaining a high competitive market advantage.
According to a survey by Gartner, it was predicted that the use of Big Data in retail industry will grab the $4.5 billion mark by 2019. The results have further informed that more than 500 businesses have already invested in Big Data and a lot more are expected to invest by the end of 2016.
“The future is going to be so personalized, you’ll know the customer as well as they know themselves” – Tom Ebling (President & CEO of Demandware Inc.)
In any retail landscape, Big Data can be effectively used for enhancing the supply chain figures, by accurately estimating the market demand, and pulling out large profits along with high customer satisfaction. The retailers with the key goal of reducing the operational costs and enhancing the profit margins are looking at the Big Data as a massive tool for vivid transformation possibilities.
For example, a leading fast-food retail chain can start analysing the data from social media for spotting the upcoming events in the local market. This will accordingly assist the retailer to be fully-prepared of meeting the demand with the required food supplies.
Big Data analytics offers the retailers to:
• Deliver a smarter shopping experience to the customers.
• Develop patterns for optimizing business operations.
• Build supply chain decisions and product assortments.
With Big Data, the retailers get the ability to build smarter insights of their customer’s buying behaviours and also to understand the essence of 5R’s in the retail sector.
The Big Data analytics allows the retailers to interact with the right person (customer) about the right product using the right media with the right message at the right moment. However, deciding which of the customers are likely in the need of a specific product, and the best practice to go putting ahead is the key aspect here. The information gathered through the transactional records makes it easier for the retailers to forecast the products demand based on the individual geographic areas.
This digital revolution is serving the retailers with surplus opportunities for enhancing their overall customer experiences. Using the Big Data Analytics, the retailers are able to interpret and collate the vast amounts of data for extracting useful and meaningful information, which is delivering utmost value to the customers and enhanced profits to the retailers. This sort of forward-thinking among the retailers is helping them to boost in the areas like:
Concentrating on value
Retailers via Big Data are able to largely concentrate on the value aspects, rather than on the price factors. One best example that perfectly matches this criterion is the leading online retailer ‘Amazon’; it follows the smart effective dynamic pricing principle, which allows the Amazon to quickly change the prices of some of its products up to 10 times in a single day. This approach has largely helped Amazon in building a strong market reputation for delivering the best value and experience to its customers.
Customising the interactions
Based on the customer’s interactions (user’s browsing history), the retailers via Big Data Analysis are offering a list of recommendations of the similar products or additional accessories, which most of the customers has already purchased earlier. The best example can be stated is the Amazon’s recommendation feature ‘Customers who bought this product also bought …’ that uses the Big Data Analysis for seizing the customers on its web site. This recommendation feature has nearly increased the sales of Amazon by 30%.
Enhancing the customer experiences
With the rise in usage of e-commerce activities, customers are enjoying the feasibility of purchasing ‘anytime & anywhere’ across the globe. However, the chances for the cheating and fraudulent activities are also gaining a large scope. This can be barred by using the Big Data Analytics, which allows the retailers to gather the information shared by the customers while making their purchases, in determining the fraudulent transactions in the real-time.
Predicting the trends
Today, retailers are using their own resources and other social media platforms for gathering the data on customer’s purchasing history and preferences. This information not only helps the retailers in offering a tremendous shopping experience, but also helps them in analysing what to keep ready in their stock. Because, the present competitive market needs efficient patterns for estimating the future demands.
Conclusion
From the last couple of years, it has become quite apparent that Big Data program is rapidly transforming the way the retailers sell their products. However, to utilize the Big Data analytics to the fullest, the retailers are in need of skilled manpower who bound to be the experts in using the Big Data and Data Analytical tools. These factors are deriving a good career prospects for the Big Data aspirants and other software professionals, who are passionate of employing themselves with the canopy of Big Data Analytics. Accordingly, to fill these market gaps, Kovid Academy is offering Big Data Online and Classroom training programmes for transforming your skills to the next levels of expertise.
