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August 21, 2016

Navigating the Unstructured Retail Data Storm

Mario D’Cruz

Retail is a rapidly evolving marketplace where product demand, customer expectations, and shopping behaviors are constantly changing. Successfully predicting the needs of shoppers and anticipating emergent trends requires real-time analysis of vast quantities of retail information. The digital age of retail has made scalable, affordable data storage more important than ever before.

Retailers can learn a great deal about their customers’ behaviors, preferences, and needs by analyzing phone calls, emails, reviews, tweets, pictures, and even hashtags. Unstructured data sources relay valuable customer insights, allowing brands to keep shoppers happy while impacting their bottom line. For example, if customers repeatedly report that an item of clothing “runs small,” the retailer can include those keywords in the product description to reduce the rate of customer returns and shipping costs.

As the retail industry hurls into the digital age, unstructured data is becoming an increasingly vital resource. International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that unstructured data makes up a staggering 90% of all digital data, while Edgell Knowledge Network’s State of the Industry Report 2014 revealed that 50% of retailers see their total data volume double every five years.

Source: IDC Executive Summary, 2015

Source: IDC Executive Summary, 2015

Unstructured data is characteristically text-heavy and ambiguous, making it so difficult to process and store in large quantities that traditional storage systems are struggling to keep up. To combat these challenges, companies are investing heavily in flexible, high-performance architectures to efficiently manage the flood of unstructured data. Object storage enables brands to store troves of complex data in a purpose-built infrastructure, which makes it possible to quickly enact on customer insights in order to boost sales and enhance services over a variety of channels.

The adoption of a flexible and affordable storage platform has reportedly increased business operating margins by as much as 60%. Today, retailers of all sizes are incorporating object storage into their Big Data strategies to leverage rapidly growing datasets and to lay the groundwork for advanced analytics in order to promote customer satisfaction and competitive advantage. Big Data platforms deliver a high-performance framework to house, process, and generate value from diverse data stores. This scalable infrastructure allows retailers to analyze data in real-time, thereby empowering more informed, data-driven business decisions. Those who proactively invest in Big Data storage platforms can provide these additional benefits:

  • Improved customer experience across all channels and devices.
  • Location-based and personalized offers on mobile devices.
  • Identification of emergent shopping trends.
  • Real-time pricing based on competitor pricing, inventory, and customer data.
  • Sentiment analysis of social media streams, call center records, and product reviews.
  • Enhanced store layouts and product placement based on behavioral patterns.
  • Demand-driven forecasting through a combination of structured and unstructured data.

As the retail landscape continues to evolve, customers are becoming more expectant of a fast, reliable, and personalized shopping experience – from app performance to checkout to the moment of use. Savvy brands are leveraging robust analytical tools to inspire business growth, delivering a holistic view of shoppers, providing streamlined services to customers and employees, and increasing profitability.

Retailers who effectively combat the unstructured data storm will deliver better customer experiences, better predict trends and behaviors, and ultimately drive revenue.

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