Home furnishings manufacturers and retailers face both a burgeoning opportunity and tough challenge. Leaders at furniture companies of all sizes are asking the tough questions when it comes to sustainable growth:
+ How can we reach consumers across channels, helping them find the products they want online and luring them into the store?
+ How can we truly engage furniture consumers whether they are in our stores?
+ How do we interact on social media?
+ What happens when customers are on our website?
+ Can I reach more than my current customer base on search engines, online marketplaces or all of the above?
Business intelligence (BI) can help answer many of the challenges in growing companies with little technological advances.
What is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence (or BI) comes from analytical software that parses through vast amounts of data and delivers actionable insights. It delivers these insights in a user-friendly format, such as executive dashboards easily viewed and digested. Many leading software platforms now have built-in BI.
Examples of BI in the furniture industry
MicroD’s OmniVue platform offers integrated analytics to view website traffic, track how users are spending time on your site, see order trends by product and learn how visitors found your site. Know in an instant what frames or fabrics are getting the most attention. Gain quick insights about how shoppers are using interactive tools for room planning and customization.
How BI Adds Value
According to tech provider, Targit, Business Intelligence is a critical component to successful omnichannel strategies. Data is the thread that connects your store to your site and all the customer interaction that fills them.
By employing BI, furniture retailers free their teams to focus on value-added, revenue-generating priorities. For instance, rather than pouring over website activity reports, they can view a dashboard to see what is trending and take action.
Some actions may be swift, such as pushing out a social media post to highlight the top upholstery pattern of the week. Others may affect multiple processes.
If a particular piece is repeatedly used in room planning, how can it be highlighted more on the site and in stores? What design ideas for the piece can you give consumers?
Contact MicroD to learn more about putting BI to work for your home furnishings business.