Learn More About Retail Intelligence Software
What is Retail Intelligence Software?
Retail intelligence software helps retailers think beyond retail analytics solutions. Retail intelligence software is not only beneficial for retail businesses to collect and measure data from multiple sources such as retail pos systems, retail management systems, retail IoT devices, e-commerce platforms, marketplaces, etc., but it also creates data-driven models that can learn on its own. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) help glean information from unstructured data, images, and videos to provide retailers with crucial business insights, helping them understand trends and make more accurate predictions.
Retail intelligence software is mainly used by consumer packaged goods (CPG) and the retail industry because of the large volumes of diverse data. It arms retailers with real-time, granular data that helps streamline operations, increase profits, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. It analyzes stockouts, shelf space usage, share of each product, and in-store displays and measures the effectiveness of promotions.
What are the Common Features of Retail Intelligence Software?
The following are some core features within retail intelligence software that can help retailers find the best solution to discover actionable insights:
Omnichannel data integration: Retail intelligence software connects data from across the entire enterprise. It provides uniform, frictionless integration across thousands of data sources from any system, including inventory management, point of sale, ERP, and CRM. The ability to save time and energy by automating the data collection, organization and storage process is an important function of the system.
Real-time data processing and insights: With the power of AI and ML, retail intelligence solutions process data as soon as it is collected and uploaded to the database. It allows real-time access to key KPIs, such as sales, inventory levels, pricing, and more. The intelligence system cleanses, validates, analyzes, and forecasts the data to create easily digestible reports for managers, decision-makers, and stakeholders.
Reporting using customizable dashboards: It empowers retail business users to visualize and analyze data through intuitive dashboards. Retail intelligence tools are equipped with capabilities to create beautiful dashboards that allow users to explore patterns in data and tell a more visual story. Data-rich visualizations take reporting and analytics to the next level and provide businesses with deeper insights into what’s happening at the moment.
What are the Benefits of Retail Intelligence Software?
Retail intelligence solutions are beneficial to retailers, suppliers, and customers. The information derived from the retail data uncovers areas for improvement and optimizes the customer experience at the store. Here’s how all the stakeholders benefit from this software:
Track customer movement: Identifying where customers are coming from is an essential feature of retail intelligence tools. It helps businesses discover how consumers find their products and websites, such as through referrals or email campaigns. It also allows retailers to run hyper-personalized customer campaigns based on their demographics.
Track customer spending: Retailers leverage retail intelligence platforms to track customer spending patterns and behaviors through loyalty programs. It also allows retailers to devise loyalty programs based on customer purchase history and provide rewards and personalized offerings to improve customer engagement further.
Deliver personalized shopping experiences: With the help of customer behavior data, retail intelligence platforms enable retailers to create unique experiences tailored to individual customers. From the first visit to post-checkout, retailers have the opportunity to personalize every step of the customer journey.
Gain visibility into supply chain: A retail intelligence platform in conjunction with a retail POS system or retail inventory management system allows retailers to see what's happening in the supply chain. It helps to track the movement and storage of raw materials, work-in-process inventory, finished goods, and end-to-end order fulfillment of the business. Using supply chain data, these tools recommend the best ways to optimize the supply chain and address related issues.
Design campaigns and retargeting: The tool helps design and run targeted marketing campaigns based on customer behavior and measure their effectiveness. Offline retail stores can plan and create trade promotions in retail stores to promote their product and services. Online retailers can see whether marketing campaigns are working and consumers click on links, open emails, etc.
Monitor social media behavior: Retail intelligence software helps retailers monitor social media behavior using sentiment analysis to track product ratings. Data from social media monitoring can be analyzed on retail intelligence platforms to gain insights about a brand, product, competitors, industry, and a lot more.
Who Uses Retail Intelligence Software?
Analysts or managers from different retail and CPG industries use this software to carry out daily routine analytical tasks. Here’s a list of a few personnel who often use this software.
Retail store managers: Store managers use retail intelligence software to track and measure store KPIs such as footfalls, sales, inventory counts, etc., on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis.
Analytics managers: Analytics managers implement data mining to draw actionable insights using various algorithms and modeling techniques such as big data, descriptive analytics, diagnostic analytics, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics using retail intelligence tools.
Brand or marketing managers: Brand or marketing managers use retail intelligence platforms to monitor brand performance through sales data. It helps to track consumer behavior and trends, which allows them to strategize marketing campaigns and loyalty programs.
What are the Alternatives to Retail Intelligence Software?
The following alternative software can partially or completely replace retail intelligence tools:
Retail analytics: Retail analytics software empowers retail businesses by providing insights into all aspects of the store using business intelligence data, such as sales figures, inventory levels, customer data, supply chain data, etc. It is a close alternative to retail intelligence platforms and can be used interchangeably. It mainly helps clean and organize inconsistent data sets and visualize them on a single intuitive retail dashboard for easy understanding and interpretation. A software named retail analytics and business intelligence tools includes features of both analytics and intelligence platforms.
Software Related to Retail Intelligence Software
Related solutions that can be used together with retail intelligence software include other retail software such as:
Retail POS systems: Retail intelligence software can be integrated with retail POS systems to pull out sales data, inventory data, customer purchase history, etc., for data analysis and insight generation.
Retail pricing software: Retail pricing software helps retailers analyze the pricing of products and develop product pricing strategies. Retail intelligence solution further helps in analyzing and optimizing pricing data.
Trade promotion management software: Retail intelligence software also collaborates with trade promotion software to measure the performance of trade promotions. Intelligent dashboards help track the progress and performance of promotional activities in a retail store.
Retail IoT software: Retail IoT devices like optimal staffing level indicators, movement tracking systems, cashier-less payment systems, smart carts, etc., can be integrated with retail intelligence software to analyze the data from these devices and recommend unique points for improvement of in-store operations.
Challenges with Retail Intelligence Software
Retail intelligence solutions can come with their own set of challenges.
Software integration: Retail intelligence platforms need to be integrated with multiple types of retail software, such as retail POS, retail management, etc., to export and analyze data. A significant risk during software integration is incompatibility, which leads to the inability to perform important functions.
Software expertise: Intelligence tools are difficult for laymen to understand and operate. Tools like these need a good understanding of data, and some data analytics skills are an added advantage. Companies need to ensure that they invest in resource capacity building or hire resources with specific skill sets before investing in such software.
Software subscription: Most retail intelligence solutions are cloud-based and available to buyers on a subscription model. The challenge to buyers is the recurring cost associated with the software. While enterprises might not find it an issue, small and mid-size retail companies may face an issue with allocating a specific budget to avail software features every year.
How to Buy Retail Intelligence Software
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Retail Intelligence Software
Requirement gathering ensures that the software has all the features a business needs. When selecting retail intelligence software, it is important to first look at how the business operates and then familiarize oneself with the different types of software available. It also helps to ask critical questions about the need for the software. For example, retail intelligence solutions help analyze complex retail data and present insights, but the buyer should also know if there is enough data to process and how these insights will help improve the existing position of the retail business.
Compare Retail Intelligence Software Products
Create a long list
Depending on the industry, the buyer might want to create a long list of software designed to help businesses. A long list always helps buyers select the right software from many products available for retail intelligence. A long list must consist of products that include metrics like product popularity, the price offered for product add-ons, schemes for upgrading, and round-the-clock customer service support.
Create a short list
A short list narrows down the long list of buyers and helps in constructive decision-making on which software to opt for. Short lists are more specific to the exact need of the buyer mapped with the features offered by the product and generally whittle down the long list based on the budget. For example, buyers looking for cloud-based retail intelligence software must not keep the software installed on-premises on the short list or only select software within the company’s IT budget.
Conduct demos
Demos are an essential part of the entire software implementation process. It ensures that the retail intelligence software is running smoothly and is compatible with the existing business system. It helps meet realistic expectations from the product. During demos, buyers should ask specific questions about the functionalities they care about most. For example, one might ask to be walked through data importing and exporting, tracking features, how to create dashboards and visualization, how to integrate with other software, or how to look at real-time retail data.
Selection of Retail Intelligence Software
Choose a selection team
A team of in-house IT personnel, project managers, heads of departments, retail experts, and end users must be part of the selection process. Along with senior management, this selection team is responsible for selecting the right software and checking the entire retail intelligence software onboarding process. Buyers can also outsource technical consultants with domain-specific expertise to give constructive recommendations and suggestions in this process.
Negotiation
The negotiation process can happen upon receiving a price quote from the vendor. To successfully negotiate, the buyer must keep in mind the available budget to purchase the software and ask the vendor for some discounts in return for an annual upfront payment. Sometimes, a software provider may offer unlimited usage or add-ons if the buyers pay upfront instead of in installments. A successful negotiation means a courteous and constructive interaction that is a win-win for both parties.
Final decision
The final decision should be based on all the information gathered, features offered, and a price agreed upon by both parties involved in the purchasing process of the product. Senior management or the head of the department should decide to select the software after carefully going through all the information provided by the vendor team. Businesses should keep in mind to choose the solution that meets most of, if not all, their requirements. Later, they can upgrade to the premium version anytime.
