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This excerpt is from Insidebigdata. To view the whole article click here

9 years ago
How Predictive Analytics is Changing the Retail Industry

 

Ideally, a retailer’s customer data reflects the company’s success in reaching and nurturing its customers. Retailers built reports summarizing customer behavior using metrics such as conversion rate, average order value, recency of purchase and total amount spent in recent transactions. These measurements provided general insight into the behavioral tendencies of customers.

However, reports summarizing average behavior don’t provide the useful insights needed to determine how individual customers are likely to behave because general behavior tendencies are simply too broad. In order for retailers to create a meaningful dialogue with customers that honors the shopper’s preferred level and mode of engagement, it takes more than summarized reports, which is why customer intelligence and predictive analytics provide the opportunity to significantly change the retail marketing industry.

Customer intelligence is the practice of determining and delivering data-driven insights into past and predicted future customer behavior. To be effective, customer intelligence must combine raw transactional and behavioral data to generate derived measures. The process can best be described using the saying, “It’s not the data that is collected, it’s the data that is created.” Put into a predictive modeler’s perspective, the team not only collects a large amount of data, but also contextualizes that data by building derived attributes that provide additional insight into customer intent.

But how do data scientists and predictive modelers determine which derived attributes are relevant? Usually data scientists lack the deep domain expertise needed to clarify and prioritize their efforts. Therefore, a collaboration with domain experts is essential. This collaboration is like a three-legged stool. Each leg is critical to the stool remaining stable and fulfilling its intended purpose. When it comes to generating customer intelligence, the three legs of the stool are retail experts, data geeks and coders, and predictive modelers or data scientists.

Retail experts have domain expertise and can best frame the problem customer intelligence is aiming to solve. They suggest derived attributes that will provide value to both the brand and the company’s marketing campaign. Data geeks are needed to program these ideas and store them in a suitable database, which can often lead to greatly increased data storage requirements for the retailer. However, if the data can only be used to create solutions or make key marketing decisions if it’s properly stored and accessed.  Inaccessible data means useless data and a wasted opportunity.

Predictive modelers and data scientists are then needed to use the stored data to build models that achieve those business objectives originally set by the retail expert. Predictive models find relationships between historic data and subsequent outcomes so that near-term and long-term customer behavior can be predicted. This leg of the stool aims to answer problems such as the likelihood of when a shopper will make their next purchase and what the value of that purchase will be. Sometimes, these relationships are so complex that only machine learning techniques will find them.

This excerpt is from Insidebigdata. To view the whole article click here.

By: Dean Abbott
Originally published at http://insidebigdata.com

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