Multi-channel workbench and analytics for retail
Manage customers with insights, not intuition
Customers interact with retailers through an array of channels—including the web, stores or kiosks, or over the phone. Marketers and merchandisers must correlate interactions across multiple channels to gain a better understanding of customer behavior and preferences. Retailers need to target customers with relevant messages delivered through the correct channels—backed by a merchandising strategy that ensures products and services are available to meet resulting customer demand. And as the number of marketing and retail channels proliferate and customer behavior trends rapidly evolve, retailers need to be agile and nimble so they can keep up with all these changes.
A dashboard to help make retail smarter
The multi-channel workbench and analytics solution for retail from IBM delivers fast insight into cross-channel customer transactions, sales, promotions, channel performance, post-sale support, and order management using multi-channel metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). The solution is instrumented, bringing together transactional metrics such as sales, profit, spend and basket-value, along with channel performance metrics such as web analytics, store and catalog performance for true, intelligent, cross-channel visibility. It combines IBM retail industry consulting, business intelligence and performance management expertise, along with supporting accelerators, templates and infrastructure components to deliver smarter business decisions through deeper analysis of the cross-channel behavior of customers and suppliers, as well as product and channel performance.
Target, track, influence and improve
The multi-channel workbench and analytics solution provides insight into customer behaviors across all channels to uncover new ways to target, track, influence, guide and improve your customer interactions. The benefits of the solution include:
- Integration of near real-time, cross-channel insights and analysis directly into your core business processes and decisions, improving customer satisfaction and cross-channel performance.
- A holistic view of customer and segment behavior, interactions, metrics, churn, loyalty and attrition across channels and segments over time.
- Enhanced understanding of sales and profitability metrics in relation to staffing plans, and how segments drive assortment, allocation and marketing to optimize channels.
- Improved analytical tooling and access capabilities to facilitate faster user access to information without direct intervention of technology professionals.
- A common, extensible and foundational infrastructure for continued expansion of analytical capabilities to support other business areas and subjects.
Components of the solution
Elements of the multi-channel workbench and analytics solution can include:
- IBM® InfoSphere™ Information Server―a revolutionary new data integration software platform that helps you derive more value from the complex, heterogeneous information spread across your systems.
- InfoSphere Balanced Warehouse®―a complete data warehousing solution comprised of pre-tested, scalable and fully integrated InfoSphere Warehouse software, server and storage components.
- IBM Cognos® 8 Business Intelligence―delivers reporting, analysis, dashboarding and scorecards on a single, service-oriented architecture (SOA). Author, share and use reports that draw on data across all enterprise sources for better business decisions.
- Cognos Planning―create, compare and evaluate business scenarios, conditions, drivers, rates and assumptions, and use best practices such as driver-based planning and rolling forecasting to determine resource requirements, operating performance and future business results in real time.