Having the right products in the right place at the right time is one of the biggest challenge for retail. Purchasing more inventory than needed is a poor use of working capital; however, if the store doesn’t have enough inventory, there may be lost sales as well as customer frustration.
Current solutions are limited to aggregated levels such as by department or category. These methods fail to capture the nuances in the data such as holidays, special events etc.
Opportunities
Machine learning models can create forecasts for up to 1 million series in each project.
Different products could have vastly different sales history, seasonality, and trends. Automated machine learning can automatically perform unsupervised clustering to find like-groups of products, and model each cluster separately (e.g., by store, region, category, correlation, etc.).
Product assortment and placement optimization
Challenges
Traditionally retailers have stocked their stores with the same products based on the season. However, different store locations have different customers, weather, display and inventory capacity resulting in very different needs. The result of one-size approach is “stock outs” on hot items and markdowns on others, both costing the retailer hard-won profits. Customer satisfaction and loyalty are impacted when shoppers cannot find items in the store.
Opportunities
AI models can look at a variety of factors: past sales, store display space, local trends, online behavior, predicted weather patterns, and more to determine which products would be the best fit for a given store location. This AI based optimization prevents stockouts by sending more inventory to stores where products are most needed and minimizes markdowns by making sure that products are on display where they can be sold at full price. AI models can reroute inventory between stores to ensure that retailers can take advantage of local trends.
Churn prediction
Challenges
Loss of customers without prior notice
No action for the customers based on their leaving probability or value to the company
Opportunities
Identify customers who tend to leave in the near future with the AI algorithms
Take actions to retain valuable existing customers based on churn prediction models
Maintain revenue from the existing portfolio
Propensity prediction
Challenges
Limited number of products and limited revenue from the customers
No proactive cross-sell or up-sell actions
One-fits-all product campaigns
Opportunities
Identify customers who tend to buy additional products or increase usage in their existing products
Take proactive cross-sell or up-sell actions to get share in the market for specific products from the valuable customers
Grow the portfolio and product coverage
Segmentation
Challenges
Lack of granular customer segments
Traditional customer segmentation without analytical methods
Opportunities
Granular customer segmentation including risk segmentation or marketing segmentation concepts utilizing advanced clustering AI algorithms
Customized customer management or risk activities based on customer segments
Customer lifetime value estimation
Challenges
Limited information regarding the value of the client
Standard actions to approach each client independent of the value of the client
Opportunities
AI models can help calculate the lifetime value of the clients
Increased revenue
Customized client actions for affluent clients
Fraud
Challenges
Lack of strong fraud models
Lack of adequate number of fraud events in the data
Opportunities
AI is ideal for anomaly detection which helps to capture unusual events in the behaviour of the customer
Fraud data events can be increased within the portfolio sample with oversampling, undersampling or class weight features