Revolutionizing Retail Industry with Business Intelligence

In a highly competitive retail industry, the importance of business intelligence in an omni channel retailer’s commerce, marketing and payments solutions,  is increasing day by day. 

What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence is the set of processes, architecture and technologies that convert raw data into meaningful information that drives profitable business actions.

Business intelligence combines business analytics, data mining, data tools and infrastructure and best practices to help organizations to make more data driven decisions.

Business intelligence, in the context of retail, is the tools and resources used to analyze past customer behavior and business performance to improve future customer experience and business performance.

According to leading journals, BI will be essential for retailers to compete in the competitive market:

Customer behavior BI

Making sense of all customer behavior as customers search, browse, friend, like, tweet, blog, and shop is critical to build efficient customer profiles to push new offers through more sophisticated targeting.

Business Intelligence helps retailers identify buying patterns of related families of products with similar attributes on factors such as geography, demographics, size or volume.

Business performance BI

As retailers are looking to optimize profitability, they need to get a real-time picture of all products’ performance across all channels. Each stage of the customers’ buying process counts to understand which channel has the best ROI. 

For example, by grouping inventory information from various systems into a data warehouse that supports trending on both historical and future KPIs, retailers can improve data quality and accuracy and manage inventory levels to avoid lost sales or oversupply.

Data Sources of Business Intelligence

What is Omnichannel Business Intelligence?

Omnichannel Business intelligence is the integration of commerce, marketing and payments business intelligence on all platforms online and offline. An integrated solution which gives one business intelligence solution for all operations on all platforms both online and offline.

The first step for the retailer is to collect the right type of data that can help them improve their commerce, marketing and payments operations to improve customer experience and maximize the profit from their multiple channels. Depending on the channel, if it’s online or offline, the selected KPIs will vary. 

A physical retailer would like to see a commerce KPI that which of his stores had the maximum sale and the factors behind that sale. He would also like to see a marketing KPI like which offline marketing actions drive traffic to his stores. 

An online retailer would focus on commerce KPIs like online sales trends in different time periods to adjust his inventory accordingly so that he can reduce his inventory carrying costs.  He would also like a KPI for average delivery times taken by different couriers in different areas so that he may choose the best courier in every area. He would need the marketing KPIs like the impact that personalized customer experience had on the conversion rate of his customers.

An omnichannel retailer will require all the aforementioned KPIs for his online and offline channels but also those KPIs which involve an interplay of offline and offline channels. For example, he will need to know the commerce KPI, how much inventory he is carrying on his online and offline channels combined or how many online orders were fulfilled by his offline stores. He will need the marketing KPI, how much of his offline sales were driven by marketing activities online.

With omnichannel retailing, knowing the behavior when a customer visits and revisits the different touchpoints before making a purchase can be very useful to leverage the customer journey steps accordingly.

What’s more relevant in the case of omnichannel performance tracking would be cross-channel conversion rate and each channel contribution to the final purchasing decision. With this indicator, retailers can get a better picture of what are the real steps to purchasing decisions and the pattern of their habits.

XStak Omnichannel Business Intelligence Solution

XStak’s deep analytics engine collects complex data from all your sales channels and converts it into real-time, actionable insights into your commerce, marketing and payments operations. These real-time and aggregated insights, empower you to stay on top of your operational metrics and help you bring operational efficiency to your business.

​Commerce Operations Metrics

XStak provides you insights into your aggregated and channel-wise commerce operations metrics like daily sales(offline and online), transactions, gross merchandise value, inventory count, inventory value, overall and location-wise fulfillment times, end customers and category-wise sell-through rate.

Marketing Operations Metrics

XStak provides you insights into your marketing operations metrics such as marketing spend, channel wise conversion rate, loyalty enrollment, member count per tier, tier-wise customer spend, earned/burned points and retention rate.  

Payments Operations Metrics

With XStak, you get aggregated and channel-wise insights into your payments operations. These insights include online B2C, online BNPL, Offline B2C and offline B2C payments.

Northstar Metrics

A Northstar metric is a leading indicator of a retailer’s performance. Based on these metrics, you can take appropriate actions and improve your business performance measured by lagging indicators like revenue.  

XStak provides you Northstar metrics with all its products so that you can gauge the operational performance of your business. Based on this information, you can take appropriate actions and improve your business performance measured by lagging indicators like revenue.   

Xstak Products Northstar Metrics

• XStak Order Management System: Northstar Metric is percentage and GMV of delivered orders within 72 hours of being placed
  

• XStak Loyalty Management System: Northstar Metric is percentage and GMV of loyalty customers who did at least one transaction per month
  

• XStak POS: Northstar Metric is percentage and GMV of e-commerce orders to total orders processed by Shopdesk

Business Intelligence provided by XStak products

XStak Order Management System

XStak OMS provides business intelligence into metrics like inventory sell through rate, location and date wise sales, sales comparison, conversion rate, retention by cohort, transactions, revenue, repeating customers, average order per customers, top sellers & cities, total transit time, order aging and courier aging.

Courier aging example screenshot:

RFM

RFM stands for recency, frequency and monetary value. RFM analysis is a way to use data based on existing customer behavior to predict how a new customer is likely to act in the future. An RFM model is built using three key factors:

(i) how recently a customer has transacted with a brand

(ii) how frequently they’ve engaged with a brand

(iii) how much money they’ve spent on a brand’s products and services

XStak POS

XStak POS provides business intelligence into sales, inventory and store performance metrics to help you seamlessly manage inventory, orders, staff and customers both online and offline stores via a single platform.

XStak Loyalty Management System

XStak LMS provides business intelligence to enable brands to design and deploy personalized loyalty programs that create lasting relationships with customers. It helps brands identify individual patterns in clients behavior and provide offers that are perfectly in life with their preferences.

Get Started

Reach out to our expert team For a demo and consultation on how XStak can help you start your omnichannel commerce journey.