There has been a steady rise in eCommerce platforms during the last few decades, putting the retail industry under relentless pressure to achieve sales targets and build customer loyalty. With the significant transformational change of new technologies and advanced solutions, the retail sector is gaining much-needed improvement.
Retail leaders understand the following to be success factors:
- Deep knowledge of a customer’s behavior, purchase patterns, requirements, attitude, and pain points
- Deliver the right product at the right time in the right place at an optimum price
The availability of powerful business intelligence and data analytics solution—Power BI and its robust capabilities—is helping to determine customer expectations and demands with real-time data insights. Power BI comes packed with features such as data discovery, custom visualization, data reporting, and interactive data sharing. This helps simplify the retailer’s journey to success.
Quick benefits of Power BI in retail
Retail industries deal with massive troves of information every day, from supplier data to a customer’s buying pattern, warehouse and inventory particulars, and logistics data. Every data point and interaction offers many opportunities to make the retail business more competent and successful.
Power BI can collect, curate, and generate actionable insights that help manage the supply chain, target customers through personalization, and reduce operational costs when integrated into all these touchpoints.
Retail organizations consistently choose Power BI to meet their self-service and enterprise business intelligence needs because of its robust capabilities. It can swiftly transform raw data into actionable insights, present them in the form of interactive reports and quickly consumable dashboards, and offers a 360-degree view of what’s happening across the organization.
Here are the top four benefits of Power BI in retail:
Power BI empowers retailers with customer insights
We live in a time where consumers give equal importance to both product and service. They expect not just satisfaction but also a smooth buying experience. To streamline the selling strategies, you need to understand their purchase patterns, and that requires access to data intelligence, which can be achieved through Power BI.
When it comes to retail analytics, the predictive and prescriptive capabilities in Power BI enable you to understand what customers need next. This can give you a competitive advantage. Moreover, the visual analytics and reporting tools in Power BI help you visualize and digest data, allowing you to spend more time finding solutions and less time formatting data. Power BI can build stunning, information-packed reports in minutes that can be shared within teams or across organizations.
When you have all the essential details handy and options to foresee what customers need next, the retail investigation becomes easier to comprehend client needs and make confident data-driven decisions.
Managing multiple stores across geographies
Retail is a dynamic business that requires growing clientele, and adding stores in new geographies is a common way to expand your brand reach. While new stores bring opportunities for more buyers, they also present challenges to maintain the brand’s reputation. Every outlet needs to deliver uncompromised service to every client. Use Power BI’s new-age interactive data analytics to discover trends in sales, inventory, and margins across each location. For example, you may have under-performing stores. Insights and drill-down can help you understand why and present ways of correcting negative trends.
Identify what promotions work best
Retailers need to respond to market changes quickly. It’s not enough to deliver high quality at a competitive price. Customers do their research before selecting a vendor, which means that your outreach and promotions need to attract and moreover resonate with your target audience. Power BI, with its profound insights, can identify which promotions work best and what products are the top performers.
Overcome retail sector challenges
Retailers, of course, face many competitive challenges for which you need to track your competition and fight for your position. This can be a daunting task as, traditionally, it requires a lot of time and effort, and it can even remain elusive. With Power BI’s retail business intelligence solution, you can enable real-time monitoring and have advanced reports at your disposal. You can use these reports to analyze your product’s performance against your competitors, conduct predictive analysis, fine-tune pricing and discounts, and create offers accordingly.
You can address many of the challenges you encounter daily with Power BI; use the right information to optimize costs and increase profitability. You gain visibility into customer buying trends and behaviors, improve your supply chain, assess your competition, and benchmark a well-performing store against which you can augment others. In addition, you can get better insights on when to best launch discounts and offers. With Power BI, you can stay ahead in the race with novel business strategies.
Leverage future insights of retail with niche Power BI solutions from PreludeSys
The real power of an organization lies with its people and data. Retailers have realized that monitoring social media alone is not enough to build a strong presence. Instead, they need to equip their operations and customer touchpoints with a self-service, analytical business intelligence tool – Power BI.
PreludeSys is a Microsoft Gold Partner that has implemented business-specific Power BI retail business intelligence solutions for clients across the globe and helped them compete with excellence. We have integrated Power BI into their various operations: supply chain, logistics, and warehouse, which has led to greater visibility into the business. Data can be auto-processed and converted into readily consumable insights leading to streamlined operations. As a result, clients achieved superior customer experiences and higher sales targets.
Looking to deploy a retail Power BI solution to your business? Talk to us now!
