EAT: using mobile BI for retail loyalty schemes

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: EAT: using mobile BI for retail loyalty schemes.

Business Intelligence software provider Qliktech recently held a roundtable event where some of its key UK customers presented their BI strategies.

The event started with BI guru Donald Farmer, Qlikview Product Advocate at the company, highlighting the use of Qlikview by organisations around the world, including BMW, Daimler Benz and Siemens in Germany. Farmer spoke about trends driving BI investments like mobility, consumerisation of IT. Interestingly, Farmer believes that these trends are short-term drivers. The key driver is the need to analyse exponential amounts of data that is increasing in terms of volume, variety and velocity a classic definition for Big Data.

The customer presentations mainly focused on traditional areas for BI investments: CRM and support for decision-making. The most interesting presentation came from UK food retailer EAT, which explained how it is leveraging Qlikview Business Discovery platform to address its mobility strategy.

As well as using the BI solution to gain more insight into the performance of staff and stores in real-time, EAT is looking to leverage Qlikview to:

• Better understand its customers' buying patterns made via mobile contactless payments.
• Enable loyalty schemes and targeted marketing campaigns through consumers' mobile phone.
• Understand how successful promotional activity is.

EAT launched Quick Tap Treats (with Orange), the UK's first mobile contactless retail reward scheme. The scheme will allow Orange customers with NFC-enabled handsets to tap their mobile phone on specially designed posters at any of the EAT stores to receive a free treat each day: e.g., a free baguette, piece of fruit, coffee. The ability to monitor and analyse this promotional activity can help EAT understand its success and the likelihood that a customer will make a purchase along with claiming a free treat.

As well as leveraging Qlikview for the mobile channel, EAT will also look at ways it can utilise staff across its stores during the London Olympics this year by monitoring store performance/activity in real-time to deal with higher demand in some areas. Future areas of investment for the company include web/online analytics and video analytics (e.g. heat maps to assess queues).