Operating within the ever-changing consumer electronics market, cellular retailers face unique merchandising challenges that extend beyond the typical lost sales due to out of stocks and markdowns from excess inventory – their business is susceptible to handset design trends, emerging technologies and of course, passing fads.

When planning merchandise, however, retailers are not completely powerless. Business Intelligence (BI) software, with its predictive analytics, helps retailers improve their merchandising processes to identify hidden opportunities and eliminate lost sales and markdowns.

Traditional CRM offerings, while effective at identifying what customers have purchased on past visits, are unable to predict what customers will want the next time they come in. This is where BI comes in.

Instead of simply determining which product is selling well, BI technology allows you to dig further into sales and customer data to identify where this product sells well, who is selling it, and why it’s so popular. With this added knowledge, managers and executives can tailor merchandising (i.e. inventory and store layout) efforts to accommodate different demand levels across the retail chain. As a result, the company can also adjust marketing, product promotions, and even sales contests accordingly.

“Business intelligence applications take advantage of multi-departmental data and make results more trustworthy, requiring less manual intervention,” writes Greg Belkin, research analyst with Aberdeen Group.

“This involves extending promotion, pricing, assortment, presentation, and in-stock decision-making farther than traditional management software such as advanced planning and replenishment systems that include crucial historical and operational data from other departments.”

RetailiQ’s advanced BI module gives you an instant look at sales performance and inventory from the entire organization. It also allows you to create custom reports to gauge sales productivity and product profitability over time – so key pieces of information, like who’s selling well and what product is hot, are just a click away.