What it does is give you a different perspective in your business, the computer perspective.
Data mining is a formal process used by organisations to look into their information. Using it they can get helpful information about what is happening. They do this by using software to look for patterns in their data. Using it, businesses have learnt more about their customers. They can use it to develop more effective marketing strategies. For example, to increase sales or decrease costs.
It is not a manual process but is computer-generated, which is both a blessing and a curse. Doing it depends on your POS system having effective data collection and processing. Something, as far as I know, we are the only ones in our market space that have a computer system that can do that? We then often add extra information like the local weather over the period, COVID lockdowns, economic data from the government surveys, etc. Then we use a specialised data mining software package. This brings these figures together and analyses the statistics.
Generally, this takes over two weeks to do it. This is because it often fails, and we have to redo it. It also often gives misleading results. Please do not believe that its results are always right. It usually takes a few attempts to narrow it down on the information where it can help. The results are sometimes interesting but not useable. Sometimes there is little you can do even if you know a pattern.
Also, when you do it, you get results like above. It is the sort of stuff that even experts find hard to understand.
So it has in the past proved quite valuable. It often identifying shopping trends by understanding the purchasing behaviour of your existing customer. It can often increase sales and customer loyalty as are predicting the market. I also find it is good at finding cross-selling opportunities in our clients' shops. This often allows our clients to increase the efficiency of their business.
If you want to give it a try, let me know. We do offer it to our clients *FREE*.
