It goes without saying that the repercussions of COVID-19 have resulted in consumers switching their buying behaviors. And as much as companies are trying to figure their way through this pandemic, retailers are realizing the need to leverage the power of data and technology to reach their customers.
As reported by Nasscom and EY, the Indian retail sector is most likely to reach a thumping value of $1.4 trillion by 2024. Driven by the changing consumer behavior and the emergence of the digital economy, India’s retail sector will be witnessing the implementation of AI and data-led disruption opportunities to break down barriers to the easy flow of data, realize analytics capabilities, and unlock data-driven insights.
Here are some ways how cloud computing and data analytics can help the retail sector in serving their customers better, decreasing costs, and increasing profits:
Predictive Analytics
Retailers need data insights to build elasticity. Faster product life cycles and increasingly complicated operations are also reasons for retailers to identify bottleneck areas in the supply chain to maximize profits and reduce costs. This is where advanced analytics and data modeling help companies in making better predictions about specific items that will be in demand. It also helps companies in making faster and better supply chain decisions. Cloud Technologies play a vital role here by ensuring the process of ingesting immense volumes of granular, semi-structured, and fragmented data from every phase of the supply chain. With real-time visibility retailers also have the benefit of decreasing inefficiencies in the supply chain and anticipates item availability.
Data In-depth
Like we mentioned above, Structured and semi-structured data from different sources are consolidated into a centralized repository. This allows universal and granular views of business and customers. Thus, facilitating easier data modeling and predictive analytics which in turn helps in making data-driven decisions. With the use of cloud and data analytics solutions, retailers have an in-depth view of their data to drive performance and efficiency.
Customer Reach
Today, ease and convenience in shopping are important for most consumers. They want a seamless yet personalized shopping experience. And to respond to consumer demands, retailers will need to adapt omnichannel and hybrid sales models. This makes way for cloud data platforms which gives marketers a single source of data aggregated from various internal and external sources which give you the ability to devise targeted marketing efforts and create personalized products & offers.
Inventory Management
Efficient management of inventory is a common challenge of the retail industry. But, with the use of cloud computing, retailers can have wide visibility of their stock. The cloud offers you access to real-time data, cloud architecture, and analytics platforms to build predictive and prescriptive inventory forecasting that focuses on decreasing issues such as stock shortage, etc.
With the use of the cloud, you won’t need to synchronize the inventories of multiple stores manually as you can access real-time stock data, from anywhere.
Data Security
Retailers constantly receive customers which means continuous data generation on a daily basis. Most retailers store their sales figures, inventory reports, customer feedback, etc on local servers. In such a case, security becomes a concern because business-sensitive data is supposed to be handled with complete care. Let us remind you that one of the main causes of business failure is the loss of confidential business data and this is why is important that you choose to store data on the cloud where your data is secure under advanced firewalls, encryption, event logging, internal firewalls, physical security, etc…
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