It doesn't have to be Christmas for shopping to present the ideal opportunity to retailers to get rich data with the potential to anticipate what customers are likely to want, thus ensuring they are adequately stocked and prepared for future spikes in sales volumes.
Along with higher footfall in stores, online retail is bringing more eyes onto the product lines and driving sales - especially during November - but digital capacity may be stretched, and outages can be damaging.
According to Uptime Institute’s 2022 outage analysis report, 80% of data centre managers and operators experienced some type of outage in the past three years. Worryingly, the proportion of outages costing over R1 million has soared in recent years. The biggest cause of downtime over the last three years is networking problems such as software and system issues. When there is an outage, revenue suffers, and customer trust is eroded, so it is imperative that ITOps teams can identify, diagnose, and fix the problem quickly, if not automatically.
Data does not equal insight
It is said that retail scan data opened the door to what the world now defines as business intelligence. Certainly, retailers’ ability to collect, store, and transmit data has grown exponentially, but there is a risk that data can be used to generate excessive reporting.
Being data rich and insight poor impedes your ability to execute and compete. For instance, store managers in bricks-and-mortar retailers can receive up to 100 daily reports, making it impossible for them to review, extract what they mean and what action should be taken.
Business data – specifically actionable data – has never been more important. Actionable insights are specific enough that they don't require another person to analyse data before they're useful to decision-makers.
How does IT operations management support this?
As the IT landscape becomes increasingly virtual, automated and analytical, it's vital for IT Operations Managers to have intelligent insights to keep the lights on and the customers buying. AIOps provide this level of sophistication, connecting the dots to present a complete, real-time view of your IT operations – across the entire ICT landscape. Alerts and tasks are handled quickly and automatically, and unexpected incidents do not become catastrophic events.
In the retail industry, automated analytics brings several use-cases to life including logistics, delivery, customer support and e-commerce. Retailers can implement dynamic product pricing, product recommendations and report adverse events. None of this is possible without a rigorous, comprehensive view of the heartbeat of IT in the business.
Savvy retailers know that they must use data to provide consumers with an experience that will keep them coming back again and again. They recognise that building a roadmap to success needs data science, AI, automation and human talent. Much of this starts with data from the IT estate – making sure the technology, infrastructure and applications are performing at peak levels. Data science provides insights into what customers are doing; AI helps analyse why they're doing it; automation empowers them with personalisation; and human talent helps them deliver on those expectations wherever they may be in the purchase journey.
If you’re looking for a trusted partner to get the most actionable insights from your IT data in the shortest time possible, talk to us. At AppCentrix, we partner with you to support your business growth with less effort and greater accuracy
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