Data Analytics today has found its application in various fields across the industry. Today, it is extensively used for strategic, operational and tactical decision-making processes, across various industry verticals. These range from Retail, E-commerce, Banking, Finance, Healthcare, Sports and Manufacturing among many others.



In the modern, technology-driven world, users or customers in the retail scenario, are not only accustomed to the digital comfort, but they are also very savvy in terms of using it. Thus, when it comes to retail, a customer who now has a fast paced world and is extremely used to instant gratification, all of which are resultant features of technology; is not only impatient, busy but also looking to be the beneficiary of an excellent service.



Just like there are many customers out there, there also exist numerous companies, which are rapidly striving to get online and combat the massive competition, from the others like them. In their bid to stay on top of the game, it is important for those companies to be able to fully understand, exactly what makes the customer tick, their likes, their dislikes, basically a full 360-degree view of their customer. What this understanding does is gives them absolute solid ground to excel at satisfying their customers and on the other hand, attracting the right kind of customers as well.



Analytics plays the most crucial role in this process as, it is the very thing that drives those ‘understand what makes the customer tick’, policies of the retail companies. Through the various functions that it carries forward, it creates insights such as, how would a company be able to increase margins at the product level, it also provides insights in what the customer is like, or why the customer would want to buy a certain product, this in the industry jargon is called as, Market Basket Analysis. The analytics help the companies also identify those items, which a customer would be very likely of purchasing together, what promotions and offers would work the very best for which products and personalized offers for every individual customer. These insights are totally customer based, but there are also those that are fully company based insights, here, analytics is able to give the insights in terms of how much spending would a company have to do, store wise product mix, optimal pricing that would get them more buyers, efficient stock strategies and so on.

Those drones that have been zooming through the sky and delivering products that the customers haven’t even probably ordered yet, is exactly where the massive power of analytics lies today. The examples of EBay, Amazon and so many others, who have successfully reaped great benefits of data analytics, goes on to prove that retailers, large and small would definitely be able to harness the miraculous benefits of analysing not only structured, but also unstructured data. There are many data analytics tools today, which have made it possible for these things, which have so long just been theoretical musings.