Now answers questions and gives insights about grocery and hard goods retail promotion impact and recommendations for future optimization
DALLAS – May 23, 2018 – Symphony RetailAI, the leading global provider of Artificial Intelligence-enabled decision platforms, solutions and customer-centric insights that drive validated growth for retailers and CPG manufacturers, today announced an expansion of skills for its digital analytic assistant CINDE to help retailers increase the success of promotions.
CINDE, or Conversational INsights and Decision Engine, initially introduced at the company’s Xcelerate Retail Forum in Oct. 2017, receives natural language input from users and provides conversational, insight-rich answers in response. Retailers have been able to ask questions about sales performance and customers by store, category and product.
With sales and customer-related questions, CINDE provides answers to questions like: “How is X category performing in X store?” or “What are customers buying instead of X product?” Now, with the new promotions skills, retailers can consider the positive or negative impacts of single or multiple promotions for a given campaign or category, and sales performance year over year. For example, a retailer can assess how Valentine’s Day promotions have previously performed at the department, category or brand level. CINDE can then provide recommendations for adjusting and optimizing promotions for future success.
In addition to answering questions on promotions, CINDE’s forecasting capability recommends and optimizes the best promotions to run based on AI-enabled forecasting models. Retailers can ask questions like, “What promotion didn’t perform well and what was the impact on sales, margin, and inventory?”
“CINDE’s insights help retailers and CPGs close the loop, providing near real-time intelligence and suggestions for improvement,” said Sy Fahimi, SVP Product Strategy, Symphony RetailAI. “CINDE goes beyond alerting you that sales are down. She tells you exactly why, and which promotions had a direct impact on sales. This removes the guesswork, telling you, ‘These are the three promotions that didn’t perform well, and here’s what you should do to address that based on the customers you’re going after.’ This is a massive time and money saver, as misaligned promotions account for substantial budgetary considerations in organizations and, historically, it’s been very difficult for marketing organizations to quickly and accurately assess the success of their efforts and adjust. One of our retail customers is currently realizing up to a four-fold increase in sales from promotions leveraging our forecast optimization capabilities.”
Further enhancing the intelligence and insights for retailers, CINDE also incorporates and analyzes competitive data to not only show promotions’ impact on sales, but also how local or online competition is influencing a retailer’s promotions and sales. For example, practitioners can ask CINDE questions such as, “Why is my price-conscious customer not responding to my promotion?”
Throughout 2018, Symphony RetailAI will introduce a series of new CINDE skills that will have significant impact on FMCG practitioners who lack the ability to quickly extract insights from massive and disparate data pools to make more intelligent business decisions.
Learn more about artificial intelligence and CINDE here.
About Symphony RetailAI
Symphony RetailAI is the leading global provider of Artificial Intelligence-enabled decision platforms, solutions and customer-centric insights that drive validated growth for retailers and CPG manufacturers, from customer intelligence to personalized marketing, and merchandising and category management, to supply chain and retail operations. Symphony RetailAI is innovating rapidly to drive faster, more profitable decisions through AI, machine learning and voice technologies. We are trusted by over 1,200 organizations including 15 of the world’s 25 largest grocery retailers, thousands of retail brands, and hundreds of national and regional chains worldwide to help solve their toughest business problems, through AI-powered customer intelligence and retail solutions. Symphony RetailAI was formed in January 2018 incorporating Symphony GOLD and Symphony EYC into the company as the Retail Solutions Division and Customer Intelligence Division respectively. More at www.symphonyretailai.com. Follow us on Twitter: @symphonyretail.
Media Contact
Adrienne Newcomb
Ketner Group Communications (for Symphony RetailAI)
[email protected]
512-794-8876