Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
X-NONE
X-NONE

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0in;
mso-para-margin-right:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0in;
line-height:115%;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”;
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

Leveraging Back Office Systems To Better Understand Customer Buying Patterns

By Peter Witham, Director and Retail Lead , UNIT4 Business Software

Just as social media can provide you instant access to the latest customer wants and trends, your back office system can also shed important light on your customers’ buying patterns. Leading retail accounting solutions provide seamless integration with your front-end operational systems. This allows you to do in-depth profitability analysis and gain better insights into what’s selling and what’s not, ultimately helping you forecast more effectively due to an accurate, single view of all of your data.

Many retailers, understandably, spend a lot of time and money on their front-end systems such as point of sale or merchandising. But think of the back office this way: a good retail accounting system is like an open book. Define your needs carefully up front and you will be rewarded with a great story. That story can cover everything, from which channel is working best for your customers to where those customers live and how frequently they shop for particular items. That story can lead you to a happy ending — a healthier bottom line.

Want to compare your bestselling online products with your top three in-store products? How about gathering insights into what customers buy most often together – beer and diapers, perhaps? How does that change as you view data by market or by country? By leveraging the capabilities of a back office system with a multidimensional financial model, as well as the power and flexibility of business analytics, you can get pretty granular in the data, creating scheduled, detailed, real-time reports or generating them on the fly.  Additionally, you can change those parameters as your needs or market conditions warrant.

Perhaps a buying pattern from your urban stores is gradually emerging in your suburban stores. Or perhaps the new “it” garment for summer is driving demand in “snowlocked” geographies. Should you implement dynamic pricing to take advantage of that? Knowing the true cost of selling that garment can help you make the right decision. Wouldn’t it be helpful to know that 60 percent of your online purchases were made by customers who visited your store first to check out an item? What if you could anticipate which products in that brick and mortar “showroom” would later lead to online sales — what would you do differently? Drilling deep into your data can create some “Aha!” moments that can allow you to be more innovative and more focused.

Often I get asked for tips on how retailers can get the most out of their technology, to help them discover and address customer buying habits more effectively. Here are a few suggestions; I would welcome your thoughts and comments.

· Kick the tires of what you already have. Although recent retail sales show promise, it is important to get the most out of what you already have before investing further in technology. Step back and take a fresh look at what you have installed. Are there features/functionality you overlooked initially that make sense now? Are your back office and front office systems as integrated as they should be, so that you can leverage customer buying patterns effectively?

· Innovate deep. There are mounds of customer buying data just waiting to be explored. Or, you need to get a handle on what you don’t have. Either way, you need to ensure you are getting the reports you need, in the ways most useful to your business, for both the way you operate today and the way you envision operating tomorrow. Your technology should work the way your business managers work; they shouldn’t have to adapt or be limited by what your technology can churn out. Is your back office capable of supporting changing channel models or new ways of doing business?

· Take your back office to the cloud.  Retail is ripe for cloud technology. Don’t overlook the cloud as a cost-effective way to modernize your back office when the time comes to do so. Effective deployments of the back office — whether in the cloud, on-premise or a combination of both, where you can move your applications back and forth between on-premise and the cloud — can help you strategically return your attention to where you want it to be: with the customer, front and center.

Peter Witham is Director and Retail Lead for UNIT4 Business Software, the North American subsidiary of UNIT4, a $624 million global business software and services company that creates, provides and supports software for Businesses Living IN Change – delivered via the cloud and on-premise. He has been involved in the retail industry for 10 years. For more information, please contact:  [email protected].