Understanding and winning customers isn’t easy, especially in this constantly changing marketplace. The problem isn’t lack of data. Data pours in from multiple systems including social media. The challenge is how to extract meaning from it to inform decision-making and enable productivity and agility in the face of market demands. Check out how IBM SPSS software is making Predictive Analytics For Retail Industry work.

IBM Cognos software is one way in which organizations are leveraging new intelligence to create a competitive advantage. IBM Cognos Analytics and Performance Management solutions provide a planning, consolidation and business intelligence platform that helps companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance. With capabilities including reporting, analytics, dashboards, planning, scorecards and more, companies can understand performance and make better decisions.

Retail operations generate huge amounts of transactional information, which provide details on product purchase patterns and individual customers or customer profiles. Most retail companies acquire this data either from their customers through rewards programs or from market agencies such as Facebook and Twitter. The sheer volume of data makes consumer buying patterns difficult to detect by manual means, and companies wind up failing to gain any benefit from all this data.

IBM SPSS Market Basket Analysis uses algorithms to analyze this transaction and customer data, relate it to previous purchases and build predictive models that can be applied to:

• Decide what categories or products to display or promote together.
• Decide whether an offer is valid for a particular customer.
• Predict the probability that the customer will respond to the offer.
• Calculate the value of the customer accepting the offer.

Applying these models allows you to select which one is best for each customer or customer segment. These selections are then delivered to shoppers in the most appropriate way either through emails, directly to their smart devices or loyalty card holders might receive targeted coupons with their monthly statement.

With IBM Cognos software, you can ensure your product offers and promotions match shopper preferences and behavior, so you can maximize the return on market spending. By linking purchases to individual purchasers, you can take this even further by tailoring offers to specific customer segments and driving higher returns from more precisely targeted campaigns.

For more information on how IBM Cognos can help your retail organization, contact Lodestar Solutions.

Heather Cole 813-415-2910 hcole@lodestarsolutions.com
sales@lodestarsolutions.com