Rooms To Go is America’s number one independent furniture company, offering stylish furniture at everyday low prices, original room packages, superior service and fast delivery.
Challenge
Premier retail and hospitality organizations are looking for more intelligent ways to manage their businesses in the competitive retail industry. For most, knowing their customers inside and out and gaining insight into the consumer decision-making process is crucial – whether they’re purchasing baby clothes, hotel accommodations or burgers. Rooms To Go (RTG) understands this and is continually looking to gain even greater insight into the needs, wants and buying patterns of its customers.
To get there, the organization needed to create a process to capture large volumes of data from sales and inventory management lines of business. Having established the right processes, RTG then needed the right tools to effectively manage, manipulate and share this data, with the ability to transform it into actionable information. Rooms To Go also wanted a solution that was easy to use and that would deliver powerful analysis and reporting capabilities to support more informed decision making. Gaining market basket analysis capabilities was also a primary driver that led the company to look for a more integrated and comprehensive solution. Market basket analysis is used to better understand the purchase characteristics and behavior of certain segments of customers.
From creating in-store displays and advertising campaigns, to understanding regional tastes regarding fabrics, colors and textures, RTG wanted to extend the value of its information systems.
Solution Deployed
Working with the Rooms To Go team, Perficient developed a performance roadmap that would transform operational data into meaningful business intelligence and provide much needed visibility into consumer buying trends. The goal was to give the organization the ability to effectively identify, classify and influence purchasing behaviors in order to maximize sales and profitability.
To achieve the project objectives Perficient developed a sophisticated, single enterprise data warehouse. This was an important step because it combined three regional databases, which were essentially separate silos of information. By collaborating with RTG and applying our proven retail experience in process improvement, implementation methodologies and information management, we delivered an integrated set of solutions on a short timeline. Our solutions tap into information resources and help accelerate the delivery of information to key RTG users, ultimately helping them to enhance the customer experience, drive efficiencies and increase revenues.
With these efforts, Rooms To Go personnel can now clearly see what furniture is selling. They can also gain a greater understating of purchasing trends with enhanced visibility into which areas are ripe for process improvements.
Further, greater knowledge and business intelligence also provides team members with insight into fundamental sales metrics that were nearly impossible to track previously without cumbersome data analysis, which required extensive collaboration between the IT department and often took weeks to generate.
Today Rooms To Go staffers can consume reports and other business intelligence in their preferred format, which makes them more likely to use, apply and interact with the information. Using tools such as dashboards to manage and measure Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of sales by day, region and location has also allowed Rooms To Go to become more agile and increase customer satisfaction. In addition, operational analysis provides users with information about the top-selling packages as well as sales by geography, category and customer type across all stores. As a result, business users no
longer have to make decisions based on a gut feel. Instead, they can adjust planning based on customer buying patterns and they can target the most likely buyers for each promotion based on validated, real-world customer information.
Furthermore, instead of hiring an outside consultant to help shed light on buying trends, which historically cost Rooms To Go $120,000 annually, users can now answer their own questions when it comes to business intelligence. This ‘self-service’ model empowers sales and marketing personnel to access reports and valuable analysis in hours, instead of in days or weeks.
Business Value Delivered
- Information has been transformed into a strategic asset that can be leveraged across the organization
- Greater access to comprehensive reports enables users to identify critical buying patterns quickly
- Reduced report generation time, from two weeks to hours
- ‘Self-service’ model empowers sales and marketing personnel to access reports and valuable analysis
- Lowered outside consulting fees and advertising costs with the ability to create highly targeted promotions to motivated buyers