Business growth is tightly coupled with acquiring, increasing, and looking after as many customers as possible. To this end, data and insights from transaction analytics has become critical to customer acquisition.
Why you need data insights
The extensive nature of customer data means that merchants and acquirers can construct future predictions, using historic information to optimize business outcomes.
Transaction analytics gives you the power to understand your target market, develop your business strengths and keep ahead of your competition.
Collecting data is one thing, but turning this information into actionable insights and solutions is critical. Proper data analysis reveals how your customers are behaving, how your products and services are performing, and how you can surpass your customers’ expectations.
Who needs data analytics?
Retailers: As a retailer or merchant, knowing your data allows you to stay ahead of the competition by understanding trends which then provide insights into sales. Analyzing data also allows retailers to efficiently manage inventory, staff rostering, supply chain management and even fraud detection.
Acquirers: For an acquirer, offering analytics to your merchants helps grow your business by attracting new merchants and retaining existing merchants. With the advancements in business intelligence that data provides, acquirers can view business volumes in a single dashboard, and assess the costs associated with processing each transaction.
This information can help improve the business performance of your current merchants, which in turn benefits you.
Can data analytics really help grow my business?
Yes. In today’s digitally driven economy, harnessing the power of data-driven insights to optimize pricing, streamline operations and improve customer service, is an essential vehicle to achieving business growth.
With a data-driven mindset, you can not only make more informed (and profitable) decisions, but you can also more effectively scale your operations, drive down production costs, and ensure you’re delivering high-value products and services to your customers.
Where do these insights come from?
The engineering of data can be a major competitive advantage for retailers by driving cross-selling and increasing promotional effectiveness. These insights can be gathered from:
- Point of Sale (POS) systems
- Mobile applications
- Website subscriptions
- In-store sensors
- Cameras
Omni-channel retailers can test and quantify the impact of various merchandizing and marketing tactics. Analyzing a customer’s browsing and purchasing history can identify needs and interests and allow retailers to personalize service in-store.
Let’s look at some use cases
While we know that collecting data is vital to maintain a competitive edge, it’s also important to understand how to leverage this information to make decisions that drive revenue and boost customer satisfaction.
Managing a dynamic marketplace. As a new business for example, trying to grow in a fluctuating marketplace without sufficient data is a formidable process. While strategies and systems may seem to work on paper, business needs shift, so it’s essential to track and monitor areas for improvement.
This is where data analytics can reveal what is effective, what needs improvement, and what needs to be abandoned.
Cost-effectiveness. Let’s say you’re facing headwinds growing revenues, you might conserve business spending in an effort to save money and resources.
Data analytics can help reduce operational costs without jeopardizing operations and negatively impacting your business. From information collected, you can determine what works best for lead generation, customer engagement, order and transaction processing.
Black Friday Mania. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are hallmark days for retailers, and in many cases, sales on these days alone account for a significant percentage of their annual revenue. Analytics can be invaluable by:
- Helping avoid inventory shortages
- Tracking customers actions as they view items, add and remove items from carts and make purchases
- Executing more efficient promotions
- Building, testing and predicting which customers are most likely to purchase specific products
Monitoring your payments system is vital to business growth
Business growth is all about understanding your target market, business strengths and weaknesses, and competition. Transaction analytics gives you vital information you need to optimize your business.
With booming transaction volumes, emerging technologies, increasing customer expectation and the ever-present risk of fraud, monitoring your payments environment has never been more important.
Leveraging transaction analytics provides powerful insights with which you can streamline the entire payments experience and nurture customer experience in a way that will help you build lasting, loyal consumer relationships and, ultimately, grow your business.
Download the guide to find out more about managing your changing payments environment
