How Self-Service Business Intelligence Is Changing the Retail Industry

ClicData is a Business Reporter client.

Collecting data is crucial, but it is not enough. This is how companies can 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 of 1.3% year-over-year between 2015 and 2019, growth rose sharply to 5.7% in 2020, and online sales represented a record 33.9% of all retail spending, the highest figure in Europe. 

In just a few weeks, most businesses brought in digital solutions that normally would 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 that they became used to during lockdowns, such as broad online availability and faster delivery. The pandemic drove retailers to expand their online presence in a hurry to survive, and many started selling through their own websites and via online marketplaces without a proper digital strategy. That lack of strategy has led to data silos and a lack of control over data sources, and difficulty analyzing and leveraging data. 

In the meantime, seamless shopping experiences both online and offline have become the norm. To stay competitive in the long run, retailers need to reevaluate their processes and reporting methods.  

However, it’s not an easy task, and 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 accurately evaluating business performance and understanding customer behavior. 

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 when they reach their goals.

How self-service BI helps retailers 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’s true that 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 help from IT. Almost unheard of a few years ago, self-service BI is rapidly growing: The overall market 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 organization’s data along with reliable dashboards and powerful automation. ClicData is trusted by more than 1,000 organizations in over 25 countries. 

In retail, the ClicData platform can be used in many ways. For instance, one art supply e-commerce business is using ClicData to track sales performance per channel and product inventory in real time. That allows the company to invest its marketing budget in the right channels, 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 multiple sources (NPS surveys, emails, search engine reviews), aggregate and analyze the data and offer a true omnichannel customer journey to improve the customer experience. 

These are just some examples of how ClicData provides business users and analysts with a consolidated view of performance that helps organizations become data-centric. From optimizing the supply chain to tracking marketing strategies 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—and not drown in data.

This article originally appeared in Business Reporter.

Image: Courtesy of ClicData