Five ways businesses have used BI to power growth

A competent business intelligence (BI) software is one of the most powerful tools in an ecommerce company’s arsenal. With it, you can easily measure your business’ performance and draw conclusions based on the data to power growth.

We’ve had a look at some real companies who have used a BI tool to scale their business successfully.

Stitch Fix

Stitch Fix is an online personal styler which uses ipaas provider    questionnaire data to recommend items of clothing to its customers. Because their business model revolves around positioning themselves as expert stylists, they wanted to reduce returns and retain repeat customers.

BI helped Stitch Fix by looking at the data from the buying process to determine what customers were purchasing and how likely they were to refund those items, and why they did. Through that, they were able to develop a more effective AI styling system for repeat customers by recommending more relevant products.

The result was increased revenue and a larger retained customer base.

American Express

Another company which has used BI to retain customers, American Express uses the technology to develop new services and offers for customers.

By looking at data in their Australian market, they were able to identify a quarter of all accounts that will close in the next four months. Through this, they were able to target those people with marketing campaigns and offers to try and retain their business.

Although American Express isn’t an ecommerce company, there’s a lot of lessons which can be drawn from their use of BI. You could use your software to find regular customers who haven’t interacted with your store for a while, and devise a strategy to encourage them to come back.

Lotte

South Korean conglomerate Lotte Corporation runs a huge number of businesses, with its food and retail brand lotte.com focused on online orders. Although they receive over a million visitors per day, Lotte wanted to discover why people were abandoning their carts.

Using BI, the company was able to gain real-time traffic insights into how many people weren’t going through with their purchases and identify the problems; for example, a slow checkout process and unclear delivery times. They also wanted to see the effectiveness of their promotional events, and how many conversions they were leading to.

Their solution after viewing their data analytics was to optimise the website as well as invest in more targeted marketing. Without BI, it would have taken far longer to identify why people were abandoning their orders.

REI

Outdoor recreational equipment retailer REI was looking for an advanced analytics solution to help them reduce costs and boost profits. Their main goal was to find a BI tool which could be presented to both employees and outside vendors for a concise snapshot of the business.

That meant finding a software which could be useful to different departments from marketing, HR and store managers to merchandising employees. The ability to view and analyse trends and metrics was invaluable to improving operational performance.

The result was an increase in sales, profit and user satisfaction.

Baylis & Harding

Wholesale distributor Baylis & Harding wanted more visibility into customer and sales data so they could make better decisions.

With BI, they were able to see relevant business data at an instant and build customer profiles, examine fast/slow moving stock, gross profits, and a range of other KPIs.

One of the biggest benefits for Baylis & Harding was that executives and managers can now view reports and data themselves, whereas previously they had to request them from IT. Greater visibility has meant quicker responses to trends and issues, empowering the company’s growth.

If you’re looking for a powerful BI tool to help power your ecommerce company’s growth, Patchworks BI is an expertly-designed system and lets you view all of your business’ data in one easy-to-use dashboard.

Click here to find out more about Patchworks BI.