This article is brought to you by Taiga, a NACS Hunter Club member.
ALEXANDRIA, Va.—Convenience retailers are increasingly investing in front-office technology solutions, as they deliver more ROI than back-office solutions, which were once the priority for tech investment dollars.
If convenience retailers want to capitalize on front-office technologies to gain more ROI and keep up with the lightning-fast changes happening in the industry, they need a comprehensive front-office platform that was designed specifically for c-stores and in collaboration with the industry.
“Our front-office system brings the raw data from a c-store’s existing technologies into a single, real-time operating system,” says Bill Ivers, CRO and co-founder of Taiga, an analytics company serving c-stores.
Ivers says the platform provides complete solutions that drive revenue, increase profit and improve customer satisfaction.
“Our AI is constantly churning through the raw data to identify new trends and subtle changes,” said Ivers. “It allows retailers to see real-time changes in basket size, profit and margin and visualize the data over time.”
A feature of the platform is a predictive AI solution that gives retailers the ability to accurately forecast changes in customer demand on a daily or even hourly basis, allowing them to better manage their business. The AI can detect major fluctuations in demand so the retailer can quickly take advantage of opportunities to drive profit.
Ivers gives the example of a weekend baseball tournament happening near a convenience store which brings a spike in sales for fuel, water, sports drinks and foodservice.
“Our AI solution would detect signals in the data and predict a major change in demand based on the last time the tournament was in town,” said Ivers. “The system would predict that you need more inventory and staff during this upcoming time period. Our AI allows retailers to capitalize on the large fluctuations in demand that occur over shorter periods of time.”
Another feature of Taiga’s comprehensive front-office platform is real-time price optimization solution. Finding the “sweet spot” for pricing products that allows retailers to maximize margins while maintaining unit sales has been done for years, but recently, pinpointing that sweet spot has become extremely difficult.
“Finding the right price for products is nearly impossible with supply-chain issues, gas-price fluctuations and inflation, and finding this pricing sweet spot manually via a spreadsheet isn’t going to cut it in this environment,” said Ivers.
Taiga’s price-optimization solution automates all of the manual analysis that happens on a spreadsheet and makes accurate pricing suggestions and can even send real-time alerts to raise prices.
“Taiga worked closely with c-store retailers to design and develop this solution. It’s scalable, and it can measure the price elasticity for every product at each store in real time,” said Ivers.
Learn more about Taiga’s comprehensive front-office platform, and how you can increase your front-office technology ROI.
This is the final installment of a two-part NACS Daily series on why convenience retailers should prioritize front-office technology spend. Learn more about Taiga by emailing info@taigadata.com or calling (888) 983-5874.