How self-service business intelligence is changing the retail industry

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Collecting data is crucial to becoming data-driven, but it is not enough. This is how companies close the gap between owning data and being data-driven

2020 was a pivotal year for e-commerce worldwide, and the UK was no exception. While e-commerce showed steady growth between 2015 to 2019 of 1.3 percent year-on-year, it rose sharply to 5.7 per cent in 2020, and online sales represented a record 33.9 per cent of all retail spending, the highest in Europe.

In a few weeks, most businesses brought in digital solutions that would normally have taken months or years to implement. E-shops strengthened their position, hybrid retailers significantly developed their online presence, and brick-and-mortar stores slowly introduced click and collect to survive.

Two years later e-commerce shows no sign of slowing, and consumers are reaping the benefits of changes they became used to during lockdowns, such as immediate availability and faster delivery.

The crisis urged retailers to go online to survive, in a hurry. They started to sell with their own e-shops and via marketplaces online, without a proper digital strategy. That lack of strategy led to data siloes and a lack of control over their sources and data.

In the meantime, seamless shopping experience on and offline became the norm. To stay competitive in the long run, retailers needed to re-evaluate their processes and their reporting methods.

However, it’s not an easy task. Indeed, too many retailers are in a paradoxical situation where they capture a wealth of data from various sources – e-commerce platforms, websites, social media ads, points of sale – but are unable to make sense of it. Unifying data is the first step to evaluating business performance and understand customer behaviour.

To achieve this goal, retailers must:

• Consolidate sales data from different channels
• Combine sales data with marketing (web analytics, social media/search engine ads) and financial data
• Be automatically alerted when sales drops occur or whenever they reach their goals

How self - service BI helps retailers to address new challenges

While a Business Intelligence (BI) platform is the ideal solution to address those challenges, small and medium-sized businesses are often reluctant to jump ahead. It is true BI was once reserved for the biggest companies, but not anymore. With the rise of SaaS cloud technologies, BI and data analytics platforms are now accessible to SMEs.

While traditional BI requires an army of consultants to produce a dashboard, self-service BI empowers non-technical users to access data and build custom dashboards without asking for any help from IT.

Almost unheard of a few years ago, self-service BI is rapidly growing, and the numbers speak for themselves: the overall market size was valued at $6.13 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $19.31 billion by 2028.

ClicData is part of this trend. It offers an end-to-end data analytics and BI platform that provides a single source of truth for an organisation’s data, reliable dashboards and powerful automation. ClicData is trusted by more than 1,000 organisations in over 25 countries.

In retail, ClicData can be used in many ways. For instance, one e-commerce art supply specialist is using ClicData to track sales performance per channel and product inventory in real time. That allows the company to invest the marketing budget in the right channel, reduce customer acquisition costs, and maintain high customer satisfaction with short delivery time.

Another one of our retail customers is using ClicData to collect customer reviews from different sources (NPS Survey, emails, search engine reviews), aggregate and analyse the data to improve the customer experience, and offer a true omnichannel customer journey.

These are just some examples of how ClicData helps organisations become data-centric and enables both business users and analysts to get a consolidated view of their performance. From optimising the supply chain to tracking marketing and sales conversions throughout the customer journey, self-service BI platforms such as ClicData are essential to retailers who aspire to become truly data-driven – not drown in data.

Originally published on Business Reporter