Retailers can win the fight for the customer with Yellowbrick
According to Gartner, global retail sector spending will reach almost $203.6 billion dollars in 2019. Gartner states that software is the fastest-growing category of technology spending, “as retail CIOs prioritize analytics, digital marketing, mobile applications, e-commerce platforms and artificial intelligence (AI) as the technologies most crucial to their organization’s mission.”
Table 1. Retail IT Spending Forecast (Billions of U.S. Dollars)
The Yellowbrick solution’s high-performance design gives retailers faster, higher quality insight, even as data volumes increase. This enables retailers to win the fight for the customer through a personalized experience and targeted advertising, and by optimizing product pricing, brands, features, and locations.
Use cases for Yellowbrick in retail include the following:
Improve customer experience with behavioral analytics
Yellowbrick enables retailers to achieve previously impossible insights, analyzing data from complex and diverse interaction points, such as point of sale, websites, mobile apps, and social media. These insights enable retailers to recognize high value customers, their motives behind purchasing, buying patterns, and which channels are best to market to customers and when. Retailers can use this information to increase conversion rates, personalize marketing campaigns to increase revenue, predict and avoid customer churn, and lower customer acquisition costs.
Personalize the in-store experience
It’s now common for customers to research products physically in stores and then order products online. Omni-channel retailers can use Yellowbrick to achieve a holistic view of the customer that is independent of their physical location. Yellowbrick provides the performance and scale for retailers to analyze data from websites, point-of-sale systems, loyalty card data, mobile apps, supply chain systems, in-store sensors, and CCTV cameras so they can do the following:
- Determine the impact of marketing and merchandising tactics on sales.
- Reduce sunk costs on poorly selling inventory.
- Personalize in-store services to identify customer needs and interests – in particular, to drive impulse purchases.
- Observe customer behavior to improve sales and discount incentivization.
Predictive analytics
Yellowbrick enables retailers to run predictive analytics over large historical data sets and even optimize AI to do the following:
- Personalize the online experience. Online retailers can combine analytics of real-time browsing and clickstream analysis with long-term historical purchasing behavior, ensuring customers are offered or can easily find the products they want, at prices they will pay. This capability is particularly useful for retailers that carry large inventories of goods that turnover quickly, as they can dynamically offer customers ideal products that are in stock, with real-time visibility into inventory.
- Understand and capitalize on the customer journey. Yellowbrick gives retailers the capability to monitor activities at every step in the customer journey, determine which customers are high value customers, and determine the best possible way to reach them based on their behavior.
- Optimize operations and supply chains. Faster product life cycles, increased competition, and increasingly complex operations are forcing retailers to optimize asset utilization, budgets, performance and service quality at levels they never have before. Key to this effort is a deep understanding of supply chains and product distribution. Yellowbrick gives retailers the ability to analyze all their data, unlocking insights hidden in log, sensor and machine data they can use to spot trends, patterns, and outliers, improve decision making and operations performance, and reduce costs.
- Enhance trade promotions. Retailers struggle to gauge trade promotion effectiveness using traditional approaches. Yellowbrick gives retailers the ability to combine predictive analytics with prescriptive analytics on large amounts of real-time data from many market and consumer touch points – the result is actionable recommendations for effective trade promotions with a high ROI. Retailers can even use predictive analytics to run simulations of trade promotions, increasing the likelihood of success ahead of time.
Fraud Detection
To protect their customers’ trust and loyalty, it’s imperative that retailers (especially online retailers) do all they can to protect personally identifiable information (PII). Yellowbrick enables retailers to analyze larger sets of historical data from more diverse sources, including point-of-sale, return rates, websites, and networks to quickly spot and stop fraud and hacking.
How leading retailers are using Yellowbrick
“The Yellowbrick Data Warehouse offers Overstock a solution to the challenge of fast analytics at a reasonable cost. It is a unique combination of simple deployment with fast and scalable analytic execution.” Manager Business Intelligence, Overstock.com
“Our standard processes saw a 3x to 10x performance improvement, without any performance tuning—running them as is.” SVP Technology, Symphony RetailAI
