Destination XL Group has rolled out DynamicAction to unify its data across the digital business and arrive at actionable insights faster. DXL turned to the platform to help it discover the steps needed to create a customer-centric environment and drive higher sales and profits. With the data, insights and recommendations gathered from the platform, DXL can:
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Create more opportunities for upselling and increase customer lifetime value and profitability;
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Drive more full-price sales;
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Break down inventory availability across channels; and
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Prioritize business decisions more effectively.
As the retailer has continued to grow, Sahal Laher, the company’s Chief Digital Officer and CIO of Destination XL Group, realized that the company simply had too much data to analyze.
“No one can have enough people on payroll to turn data into insight,” said Laher in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “Even if we had 100 people on our analytics team, it’s just not feasible to look at that when we have 10,000 SKUs across our different brands and offerings.”
With the DynamicAction platform, DXL specifically seeks to improve its retail experience, leveraging unified insights from four categories:
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The Customer: DXL can understand its customers’ shopping patterns and identify which combination of products, promotions and customer profiles frequently drive increased purchases, which creates more opportunities for upselling and increases customer lifetime value and profitability;
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Product: DXL is working towards driving more full-price sales by accessing a holistic view of product exposure, profitability, fragmentation and conversion. With such a view, DXL can better understand inventory availability and identify areas of profit opportunity;
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Inventory: DXL gains a unified view of inventory and returns, flagging understocked and overstocked items and allowing the retailer to break down inventory positions and availability throughout its digital channels; and
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Profitability: DXL can now leverage a data-driven view of profitability and profit influences, helping its team to prioritize and take actions that drive towards business goals.
DynamicAction’s machine learning capabilities were a compelling reason that drove the DXL team to select the platform, in that it continues to refine its data analysis based on a continued loop of user feedback, said Laher. This analysis saves employees’ time, freeing them up to take on other tasks.
“We don’t have to go through pages and tables worth of data and try to make sense of it,” Laher said. “For example, literally every day, there’s a list of recommendations that will surface based on sales data from the day before. Our internal teams can spend a lot more time with managing the business, and less time with collating and massaging data that’s not all in one place. Ultimately, we don’t act on every recommendation that the platform serves up, but it’s great to have that list every day to help make those decisions.”
Balancing Art With Science
The continually evolving retail climate is exerting new pressures on established brands to find ways to stay relevant. Laher noted that all retailers need to embrace a fundamental shift in thinking that requires finding a balance between art and science, will less of the antiquated “gut feelings” that still pervade in many industry business decisions.
“You can’t be competitive in today’s world with just art,” Laher said. “You need to look at all of the other attributes, whether that is historical information, social sentiment data or weather data. There’s all of these things that need to be infused into your decision making in terms of: How much of each product are you going to order? How much do you need to replenish? At what rate do you need to replenish a certain product? That really requires science as well. You can’t go too far to one end of the spectrum.”
