“Data is the new oil? No, data is the new soil.” – David McCandless
As the retail industry is becoming more customer-centric, the company’s ability to capture and use customer insights to customize products, solutions and the customer buying experience as a whole is critically important.
According to Gallup research, organisations that leverage the customer behavioural insights correctly outperform competitors by 85% in sales growth and more than 25% in gross margin. In today’s retail, it is imperative to see customer data as a strategic asset.
Data is being used by retailers for long. According to BCG, retailers have long relied on information from Point Of Sale (POS) and other systems to optimize how products are priced, promoted and merchandised.
The retail industry has been slow to harness the full potential of customer behaviour data. The present systems of most retailers cannot extract the maximum benefit of their invaluable data. The old mindset of some retailers acts as a major bottleneck for the digital transformation.
Also, the adoption of IT has allowed organizations to generate more data and reports than ever before. The paradoxical result in most cases, however, is that business heads are drowning in a sea of data without the tools needed to translate that data into genuine intelligence and actionable insights.
Table of Contents
Importance of Data Visualisation & Retail Analytics
Dunnhumby has been one of the pioneers of using Customer Analytics and Business Intelligence in transforming the customer engagement of retailers over years.
Dunnhumby partnered with Tesco in 1994 to launch its Loyalty Program. During the first presentation to the Tesco board after 3 months analysing the customer data there was an awkward silence after the presentation, which was eventually broken by Tesco's then-chairman, Lord MacLaurin. He made a remark that has gone down in the supermarket's folklore:
"What scares me about this is that you know more about my customers after three months than I know after 30 years."
What happened after that is history.
Dunnhumby went on to transform the growth trajectory for Tesco then onwards and eventually doing the same for numerous other big Retailers across the globe.
Retail analytics have come a long way now as retailers are empowered to make strategic business decisions based on real-time information—not just gut instinct.
One survey by Alteryx found that 81% of brands gather shopper behaviour insights, and 76% consider insights to be critical to their performance. But most retailers aren’t really doing anything with the data as only 16% would call themselves experts when it comes to data analysis.
A large share of the time (30-50%) that is invested in the planning process of many retailers is still taken by collating data and creating reports, something that can be completely automated today by using retail dashboards.
What is a Retail Dashboard?
A retail dashboard is a performance monitoring tool to visualize and report all important business KPIs in one central interface and turn this collected data into actionable insights.
It empowers retailers to identify customer behaviour patterns like who your top customers are, how much they spend, and what they're buying in order to enhance customer engagement, improve stock management, optimise promotions, lower churn rate and ultimately increase sales as well as the profitability of the business.
In today’s modern customer-centric retail, the analytics dashboard suite might have information about business KPIs, customer segments performance, customer sentiment and even predicted metrics like future sales, next month churn, etc., among other things.
Typically, you can customise your retail dashboard to present the information and KPIs you think is most important to achieve your business goals. Retail dashboards can also be accessible via many devices and in real-time, so they enable business owners to manage their retail stores remotely—this is especially helpful in the case of retail chains. Centralised Team can analyse and execute actionable insights sitting at the HQ by using the dashboards.
Nowadays, we even have intelligent dashboards where you can create micro-segments from the dashboard itself and create Campaigns from the dashboard platform just by the click of buttons. For example, you can track the number of customers who did not shop for last 90 days and send an SMS from the platform to remind the customers.
Why Do You Need A Retail Dashboard?
In today’s hectic world of retail, it is tough to keep up with daily data requirements, let alone make informed decisions about where to invest time and money. Retail dashboards with valuable data visualizations reveal key insights to decision-makers.
Retailers should consider a retail dashboard, especially because today’s technology retailers are sitting on data gold mine. In today’s data-driven world, retailers who not paying attention to the key business metrics will quickly fall behind. Here are a few reasons why any retailer in needs a retail dashboard suite:
- To know your customers
- Stay in control of your retail business
- Understand the reasons behind customer behavioural past, present & future trends and act accordingly
- Manage inventory & promotions effectively
What Information Can be Accessed in Your Retail Dashboard?
Retailers can gain insight from an ocean of information that they are recording as per their business needs. One can customise it to show as much or as little data as per their business requirements.
Historical data, live data, and even output of predictive machine learning models can be embedded inside dashboards. Right from number of customers joined on a particular day 4 years back to who is at risk to churn in next 3 months can be seen in the dashboards.
This gives decision-makers the required insights to make appropriate data-driven strategies.
Specific dashboards as per business needs can include (but not limited to):
1. Customers
Customer buying behaviour by different customer segments, demographics, loyalty tiers, other attributes. New registration trend by acquisition channels, segment movements, historic and predicted churn can also be accessed among other metrics.
2. Sales
Sales KPIs (like sales, loyalty sales, number of transactions, average transaction value, returns, etc) by stores, regions, customer segments, staff, product categories, Hour/Day/Week/Month/etc.
3. Loyalty
Dashboards for loyalty KPIs like points issuance, redemption, earn to burn ratio, loyalty customers profiling, loyalty engagement score, etc. by store, region, time period, etc.
4. Inventory
Inventory KPIs like stock levels, sell through rate, etc. by stores, regions, season, etc.
5. Promotions
Instore promotion measurement like uplift, ROI, halo effect, cannibalisation, promotion penetration, new acquisition, etc. by different customer segments even at store level
6. Campaigns
Campaign measurement dashboard for KPIs like campaign incremental sales, uplift, response rate, coupon redemption rate, ROI, etc. by different customer segments, store region, time period, etc.
7. Category Performance
Product category sales, repeaters penetration, loyalty penetration, top selling items for a different combination of store, customer segments.
8. E-Commerce
Will give you insights regarding website visits, bounce rate, conversion, engagement, loyalty customer sales, category sales, search trends, cart abandonment, etc.
9. Finance
Points Issued, points redeemed, liability, profitability, taxes, etc.
10. Store Managers
Dashboards for store managers capturing important store level KPIs
11. Business Updates
Weekly/Monthly/Quarterly business update dashboards
5 Retail Dashboard Examples You Can Start Using Today
1. Customer Dashboard
With customer dashboards, you can get a 360° view of your customer base and understand their buying behaviour. You can find how many customers were acquired, shopped, or did not visit for any required timeframe.
You can also see how the repeat rate, ATV, etc. of your customers are increasing/decreasing over time and the profile of your customers are changing over time across stores. This helps retailers to access the detail view of its customer base on click of a button.
You can also create Customer Segments like RFM, Trip Mission, Price Sensitivity, etc. and see the segment migration trends over time in your dashboards. These dashboards will help you to get to the Customer Behaviour shifting trends and its root cause.
You can also build Dashboards related to capturing the voice of customers like feedbacks, NPS, etc. and take quick actions based on its insights.
Use Cases
- Customer acquisition trend, transaction behaviour and repeat rate behaviour of new Customers
- Track the important customer segments migration over time, seasonality, etc.
- Churn trends and track its contributing factors
- See customer demographic or transactional behaviour change over time in growing and degrowing stores
- Sentiment analysis of the feedback of customers, connect with customers with low NPS and take measures to resolve issues with the customer (short term) and improve the process that is causing complaints (long term)
Important KPIs
- Customer % by different demographics & transaction behaviour like ATV
- Frequency
- Recency
- Tiers
- Repeat rate
- Active or inactive
- New registrations
- Acquisition channel
Dimensions
- Stores
- Time
- Important customer attributes & segments
2. Sales Dashboard
With retail sales dashboards, you have all the sales KPIs you need to track at the click of a button, gathered on one efficient overview. Starting with an estimation of the total sales, transactions, etc. you have exact numbers of what your business deals across different time periods.
You can calculate an average transaction value/order value per customer to have an idea of their behaviour, but this metric is better tracked over short and long time periods and compared with respective customer segments or cohorts, to have a more like for like comparison.
Use Cases
- Track sales trend and LFL performance – Overall and at any store level
- See the sales driver metrics and get the contributing factors of growth/degrowth
- Monitor the shopping basket (ATV) and find the contributing factors of its change – like for example change in ATV can be due to change in units per transaction or in a change in average price per unit. This would be explored more when you see the change in basket items/item categories for the customers.
- Track the returns % and see if any item or category is triggering more returns so that the issue can be taken and streamlined before it becomes a major concern for customer dissatisfaction
- See the discount contributed sales and create strategies to get maximum sales with optimum discount levels
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Important KPIs
- Sales
- Transactions
- ATV
- Returns
- Average Discount %
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Dimensions
- Time
- Stores
- Customer segments
3. Loyalty Dashboard
Loyalty dashboards give insights regarding the performance of the loyalty program and its financial implications. You can track loyalty sales penetration, loyalty transaction penetration, loyalty engagement score over time and targets can be set & tracked based on the overall business goal.
Use Cases
- Track Loyalty Sales Penetration by Stores and focus on stores with low % or high headroom for growth
- Focus on CLTV and take action on the customer segments with high growth headroom to increase CLTV
- Track Earn to Burn and see how the Loyalty engagement score is changing over time. Focus on increasing points of redemption penetration as there is a much higher chance of customers staying loyal to the bran if they start redeeming points/offers.
- Optimise marketing activities & campaigns by focussing on both short term & long term ROI
- Track Points expiry and see areas where the customers can be engaged more to redeem points
Important KPIs
- Active loyalty customers
- Loyalty sales %
- Loyalty transaction %
- New registrations
- CLTV
- Points issued
- Points redeemed
- Earn to burn
- Points expired
- Loyalty engagement score
- Loyalty ATV
- Loyalty program ROI
Dimensions
- Stores
- Time
4. Campaign Measurement Dashboard
The campaign measurement dashboard is one of the most frequently tracked dashboards for any CRM team of a retail chain. This dashboard gives the performance measurement KPIs of different campaigns done by the CRM or marketing team.
Some important KPIs tracked by this dashboard are the overall Incremental Sales generated by any specific campaign, the response rate of the campaign and the ROI for the campaign. The response rate and redemption rate might be different for specific customer segments/micro-segments and deep-dive analysis of it normally helps us with actionable insights for future campaigns.
Use Cases
- Witness the incremental sales of campaigns and explore what is contributing to it
- See the response rate by customer micro segments and find the segments which respond better to the type of campaign
- Monitor the change in ATV for the campaign with respect to the control group and see how it impacts the long-term spending behaviour
- Find out the change in latency for the campaign responders and see how the total number of transactions or repeat rate changes over a longer period of time
- Understand how the campaign performs with respect to control of A/B testing cohorts and find which would be better for which micro segment
Important KPIs
- Incremental sales
- Response rate
- Redemption rate
- ROI
- Uplift
- ATV
- Latency
Dimensions
- Customer segments or micro segments
- Test or control
- A/B testing cohorts
- Store or geographic regions
- Time
5. Inventory Management Dashboard
The inventory management dashboard helps in getting the historical and live inventory, sell through rate (STR) and out of stock information across different stores/geographical regions. This helps the team in planning the inventory distribution in a way that loss of sales can be minimised, and optimum inventory level is kept for the operations.
Important KPIs
- Stock value
- Sock quantity
- Holding period
- STR
Dimensions
- Store
- Time: Live or historical
- Manufacturer or brand
- Product categories (Division to SKU level)
- Product attributes like colour, size, season, style, etc.
Things to Explore Before Getting A Dashboard Suite
Before you decide in getting a dashboard suite, you should keep the following things in mind to make sure that the dashboards will give you both short term and long term value:
- Data availability
- Customised KPIs
- Dashboard audience
- Access management
- Refresh frequency (Live/Scheduled refresh)
- Cloud-based or on-premise
- Data security
- Pricing
You might already have some sort of retail reports or dashboard that you stitch together every month—maybe it’s an excel report you maintain manually. But to create a comprehensive virtual command centre for your business, the dashboards need to be backed by a powerful tech stack that integrates seamlessly.
A CRM product like Ingage can seamlessly integrate, visualize, and translate the data for you—so you and your team can spend more time making important business decisions and less time creating the reports and figuring out what those moves need to be.
Ingage is a retail analytics focussed AI-ML driven product founded by Ex-employees of Dunnhumby, Target, and SymphonyIRI. Please feel free to explore Ingage and share how we can help you in creating value for you and your customers.
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