In today’s technology-driven world, every moment creates data. For retail, hospitality, and food and beverage businesses, this means each interaction is an opportunity to make your company more efficient and effective.
Knowing where to look and how to interpret the overwhelming amount of data, however, is a different story. If you want to increase revenue, decrease costs, reduce shrink, and reap the myriad other benefits of data analytics, it’s best to partner with a consulting firm that can expertly sort through your raw data and provide you with important insights.
In addition to having an analytics firm administer your point-of-sale system (POS), it might be even more beneficial having them monitor and analyze the data for you. There are consulting firms that do either or both.
Optimizing team operations, forecasting customer behaviors, and reducing shrink are just a few ways a data analytics consulting firm can use real-time metrics to improve your business. Here’s how.
Optimizing Operations
Our data-rich environment provides a way to go beyond intuitions when it comes to operating a business. Data can be applied to optimize operations such as staff training, supply chains, and even predict customer purchases.
Streamlining Staff Training & Performance
Many retailers establish a generalized training program for their staff based on manager observations and, if they’re a bit more advanced, informed by some business metrics. Unfortunately, these often rely on incomplete pictures or aren’t adjusted often enough to meet operational inefficiencies.
A thorough data analytics firm can connect staff training to key metrics, such as dollars per cart or units per transaction, or even generate upsale reports. These can be monitored weekly to identify areas where further training may need to occur.
Additionally, location-based reporting (LBR) can be employed to identify lower-performing areas or spaces that may be good candidates for upsale opportunities or display changes. Or use LBR to reward employees who have provided extra support to customers.
Improve Supply Chain
Two stores are not going to experience equal demand for the same products, and when you have a national—or even regional—chain of brick-and-mortar locations, supply chain logistics become exponentially more challenging. Rather than rely solely on human processing, you can leverage data analytics to improve your supply chain, from product selection to the moment employees place items on shelves.
With data analysis, you can monitor your supply chain in real-time, which will keep you on top of your entire operation—from preventing bottlenecks to pinpointing better supply sources, and even improving in-store availability.
Predict Customer Wants & Needs
Your POS isn’t just for tracking purchases and transactions. Its data can help you understand what sells and what doesn’t.
Suppose you have a customer who visits your store every six weeks for the same product. Usually, it would take a discerning employee at least a few visits—over the course of several months—to notice this pattern. With the power of data analysis, you could pick up on this trend much quicker—leveraging it to more accurately market and upsell to that customer.
Imagine being able to predict what consumers will want and which products can be sold more if grouped together without waiting for the long, drawn-out, human-led, trial-and-error process. Rigorous data analysis drives quicker, superior decisions. Data analytics pivoted in 2020, and smart industry leaders are adjusting accordingly.
While many consulting firms will analyze specific data such as conversion rate, units per transaction, or foot traffic, more advanced business analysts will decode all of your complex data, providing additional insights regarding what you can optimize for, even highlighting metrics you didn’t know you should be tracking.
Stopping Shrink Before It Harms Your Bottom Line
On the other side of the coin, data won’t only help you increase revenue. It’ll also decrease shrink. With the right data analysis, you can detect suspicious patterns in customer transactions—and even among employees—to stop fraud before it becomes a major issue. As many retailers already know, organized retail crime (ORC) is a widespread problem that affects businesses nationwide.
Say, for example, an employee is secretly using their own rewards card on customer transactions to net coupons and other monetary bonuses. It might take a few shifts, if not several weeks or even months, for an enterprising, sharp-eyed team member to notice the anomaly.
However, with the proper data analytics suite—and the right team monitoring the data—you’d be able to pinpoint the card’s usage to the exact shift as soon as data is available. This enables you to catch fraud much sooner, saving your business valuable time and money. And if your company is encountering a highly organized network or ORC, advanced data analytics can play a powerful role in preventing theft or fraud.
Specifically, an advanced data analytics firm might employ an exception-based reporting tool to compare new data against an established set to raise any potential red flags. Any of this can be analyzed to determine when fraud or theft has occurred—done in real-time rather than manually over an extended period.
This can help retailers more easily identify customer fraud in a few more ways:
- Returning stolen items for refunds
- Exchanging items bought on discount, then returned without a receipt, asking to receive full price back
- Returning funds from a transaction made with a stolen credit card to be transferred to another credit card
Further, closely monitoring the point-of-sale, a data analytics firm can flag other abnormal activities such as excessive refunding, voided line items, or canceled transactions.
A capable analytics firm will also generate risk reports for you, identifying where to focus your loss-prevention efforts. You no longer have to guess where shrink occurs or intuit which policies to prioritize. Sharp business analysts do that for you.
Partnering with a data analytics consulting firm can optimize business operations, streamline staff training, improve customer experience, and reduce shrink. The key is finding a reliable firm capable of helping you understand what all the endless data means and how it can best benefit your business.
Work With The Zellman Group, The Data Analytics Experts
The Zellman Group is the foremost expert in leveraging data analytics for everything from loss prevention to optimizing retail operations. Zellman provides an unbiased analysis of data, relying on experience and expertise to help identify trends and anomalies. You can hire Zellman for all of those benefits rather than try to build your own data analytics department. Contact us today.
