RSR’s latest study on BI & Analytics in Retail shows those retailers that understand the strategic importance of new data about the
customer experience are already becoming the next generation of Retail Winners.

Some highlights from the study:

• The ability to plan and execute more effectively has supplanted reporting results as the most important use of data that retailers
  collect. And almost one-half of the survey respondents believe a top use of their data is to manage relationships with customers (Research Overview).
• Retail Winners continue to focus on the challenge of understanding what consumers are demanding, while Laggards look over their shoulders at how their
  competition is responding to consumer demands to model their own responses (Business Challenges).
• Lagging retailers rely more heavily on experience and intuition than Winners to make operational decisions. Winners consistently put more
  emphasis on making decisions using experience/intuition AND data (Opportunities).
• Retail Winners are moving on to the next opportunity: to be able to execute with more precision based on what they learn from customer insights, and
  to react more quickly to shifts in demand. Specifically that means improved inventory effectiveness and improved Marketing effectiveness (Opportunities).
• Winners fret about the availability of analytical talent available to them, and therefore want simpler tools. Laggards worry about budgetary
  constraints, but they also are concerned about the complexity of existing tools (Organization Inhibitors).
• Data visualization and predictive modeling are becoming important to retailers’ basic BI & Analytical capabilities.
  Winners are moving faster to deliver insights for operational use through mobile access, alerts, web browser access, and scorecards & dashboards
  (Technology Enablers).

Throughout this report, the underlying theme is that information = Intelligence = Winning. To that end, we’ll offer several pragmatic
suggestions on how retailers should proceed. These recommendations can be found in the Bootstrap Recommendations portion of the report.