Overview
Miniso is a fast fashion retail company with 5000 stores around the world, 30 of which are in Australia.
Retail is a fast-paced industry, and the majority of sales are based on observations. Miniso was going through a growth phase and looking for a solution that would not only help improve customer satisfaction and staff training but also increase retails sales.
How could they leverage technology and data science to provide reliable data and justify what items should be used for cross-sell / up-sell based on the daily sales from each store?
The Challenge
Since inception each Miniso store has found it hard to justify what products they should cross-sell and up-sell. There was no systematic way to train store staff to cross-sell and up-sell products to customer.
Miniso were looking for a solution that would be able to provide the right product recommendations to their staff through their POS system. This would then allow the staff member to approach the customer with thoughtful and relevant products to what the customer was already purchasing.
When someone comes into our store and purchase a product, we would like to know how likely someone is to buy another product.
“A lot of the time we look at our sales based on observations. There is no scientific data back up to tell us whether the data is true, or the observation is true or not.” James says, “We wanted a more scientific way to justify no matter in cross-selling or up-selling that we are actually selling the right thing to our customer”
The Solution
Antares was able to assist Miniso with a solution that benefited both customers and stakeholders. Through AI and Machine learning Antares Data Science team developed a product recommendation tool that also became a training tool.
By having the perfect mix of academic, business and IT our team was able to provide a thoroughly researched data science approach to the engagement
The product recommendation tool helps Miniso staff identify different cross-selling products with reliable and accurate data. This will push up the sales across each of the stores and also help to justify if the cross-selling mechanism is correct.
The Results
“We estimate that 20% boost for the business, because once we know what we should cross-sell there is a higher chance the customer will take the recommendation,” says James
In addition to the increase revenue Miniso has been able to align all stores across Australia with the one solution.
“By implementing this solution all our sales teams are unified, we can tell them if people buy A, then they will buy B. We are providing the same service and same cross selling across all 30 stores,” James says.
Their staff are empowered to make relevant product recommendations to their customers and now have a better understanding of shopper behaviour.
The stores are not the only ones to benefit from this tool. The buying office can also make use of this data to generate accurate sales forecast
The next steps for Miniso are to have the solutions rolled out online as well.
