Analytics and your business success

In the competitive retail and F&B industry, it is not uncommon that you will find one shop selling a particular product, but just a few units down the row, you will find multiple shops selling the same products. Just like the bubble tea scene in Singapore today.

As such, business owners are constantly finding ways to increase revenue while cutting costs. With analytics, this will be much more achievable. Let’s look at the 4 big ways analytics helps you achieve your business goals in this article.

Research conducted across five key regions shows that 56 per cent of customers feel that personalized offers are important in their shopping experience, and 58 per cent of customers expect retailers to know the reasons for their return.

With this in mind, comes the need to analyse customer’s buying patterns, for example, which best selling products, studying customers buying patterns and creating promotions based on their buying patterns, and anticipating reasons for a customer’s return. This will give customers a personalized experience which encourages customer loyalty and builds your brand reputation at the same time.

In any business without a proper security and risk management, fraud is bound to happen. One of the best ways to prevent fraud is to collect data about staff behaviour, for example, the average number of voided or deleted items, end of day cash count versus the expected cash count, etc. 

Using these data, you could identify the staff’s norm behaviours and outlier behaviours which will give you an early indication of fraud. This way, you can safeguard your revenue by identifying potential fraudulent behaviour before it takes place.

Wastage has always been a huge concern for any business, especially for those in the F&B industry. Using data collected, you can identify products which are doing well and those that are moving slow. This way, you can save cost and cut down wastage by ordering less of the slow-moving products. The cost savings could be put into making sure that the best sellers do not go out of stock.

In any F&B or retail business, there will always be a peak and non-peak period of the day or week. Without collecting accurate data and analysing it, you would not be able to tell when the peak hours for your business are. By analysing data collected, you are able to manage the deployment of manpower effectively.

Deploying the optimum number of staff to handle your customer volume will help boost customer satisfaction as staff will not be overwhelmed, contributing to improved customer retention rates and increased revenue.

Having seen the benefits of gathering data and making meaningful analytics with it, a fundamental part of analytics is still about gathering data which can be a time consuming and tedious task which not many can afford. 

An easier alternative would be to get a comprehensive POS system like MegaPOS, which has over 80 reports that cover almost every aspect of your business, accessible at your fingertips through our robust cloud backend system and POS. 

If you are interested in a POS system which allows you to enjoy the benefits of business analytics, contact us for a free consultation at (+65) 6224 5788, or drop us a demo request below!