The need to move from ‘fixed’ intelligence to ADAPTIVE intelligence
For a long time retailers have made half-hearted attempts to attract customers to stores. But in reality, they have steadily lost market share to Amazon and other online retailers.
Retailers have dogmatically managed the businesses from their inward point of view. Amongst the many problems this bias poses, the most negatively impactful are:
- Aligning Merchandise Hierarchy & Promotions to Suppliers instead of to Customers
- Using pre-determined CDTs instead of extracting them from customer basket data
- Using a ‘Russian Doll’ style clustering and ranging approach
If even CoVID doesn’t finally change store retail, nothing else will. Customer are moving online and visit a store only when they WANT to. To remain viable against online retail, stores MUST raise the performance for customers. Customers will not tolerate poor ranges, poor availability or poor service in store anymore.
The RIGHT OFFER in the RIGHT STORE
The most basic requirement for a retailer now is to have the right offers in the right store.
Many retailers do not use data science or machine learning.
The standard tools and approaches that are currently in use do a poor job and haven’t evolved for a long time. They only help to move retailers from the basic (spreadsheet based) to an intermediate (rules based) process and this process often takes years. While the intermediate process is automated, it is still driven by inward-looking decision making, heavily influenced by suppliers and consequently has little impact on the bottom-line.
In spite of all the manual processes, time and resources spent, retailers lose 3-5% of total sales due to ranging and operational issues. Retailers tediously apply rules and curate the assortment manually using past trends and supplier negotiations. Human bias prevents optimal customer offers, stops shoppers from buying what they want, hand hurts customer experience.
Retailigence’s suite of AI enabled solutions uses a disruptive approach that now makes it possible to create a quick win differentiator.
Deploying these solutions drives a retailer directly from a basic (or intermediate) process to a cutting edge one. RETAILIGENCE Clustering and Assortment solutions are:
- Intuitive, user friendly and highly visual
- They use data without prejudice, are unsupervised and without hindsight bias
- Instead of historical, RETAILIGENCE is future facing
- Instead of manually driven, Retailigence analyses customer basket data to drive itself
- The intelligent Control Tower continuously monitors efficacy of the Assortments deployed and flags issues