More transactions than ever are taking place without a customer ever setting foot in a store. Retail chains' responses to this tendency have taken the form of slimming down, becoming highly targeted at customers and employing new technologies, from interactive displays on the floor to business intelligence software in the offices. The goal of this effort is keeping retail stores relevant in the twenty-first century.
Retail Info Systems, listing strategies to reclaim Amazon shoppers for physical retail, suggests delving deep into the world of data analytics. Amazon, the source contends, is driven by a state-of-the-art analytics system, tailoring customers' recommended items.
RIS's recommended solution to the problem is the embrace of a new generation of business intelligence software able to make sense of the unstructured data flowing in to retailers about customer preferences, much of it from the largely untested waters of social networking. These new applications are offered in addition to BI's conventional role as a tool of internal analysis.
On the present state of analytics in the retail sector, BI industry executive Gerald Cohen said that "business intelligence is an increasingly vital tool in retailers' arsenals to help them make more informed decisions about the entire state of their business and optimize processes, both internally and externally facing, to adapt to the changing retail landscape."
