To create effective marketing and personalization strategies that align with customer desires, retailers need to leverage the power of data. According to a Microsoft-sponsored IDC study, retailers have the opportunity to gain $94 billion from the “data dividend” through the next four years.
Microsoft’s Power Business Intelligence (Power BI) suite is designed to enable retailers to visualize data and give employees access to insights that can drive deeper customer engagement and loyalty through differentiated customer experiences. Combined with the Microsoft SQL Server platform, Power BI provides real-time access to enterprise data — whether it’s sales trends micro-segmented by demographics and geography, or predictive modeling for accurate forecasting.
The solution includes built-in Q&A features in which the system answers user queries in the form of interactive visualizations. Retailers can either operate Power BI in Excel or subscribe to Office 365, so Microsoft can manage the infrastructure.
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Power BI recently added a new feature that offers connectivity to SAP BusinessObjects BI, enabling businesses to discover and combine SAP data with public, corporate and Big Data sources such as Microsoft Azure HDInsight. Additionally, Salesforce.com data can be connected to Excel and Power BI to visualize information and uncover new insights.
