According to Forrester research, prescriptive analytics for retail will overtake predictive analytics, as it surfaces likely outcomes from a set of actions — but the process of building and testing a nearly endless number of variables is inefficient. 

Prescriptive analytics give solid recommendations about what to do next. Intuition, instinct, and opinions are no longer acceptable tools of the trade for retail: People let cognitive biases and corporate politics inundate their decisions, and updating hard-coded application decision logic as rules change is expensive. As one US fashion retailer recently told us, 'Retail executives need to recognize that the skills and know-how that got them where they are today no longer apply . . . the consumer has changed, and their expectations continue to change, rapidly.'

Use prescriptive tools to validate — not replace — decision making. Prescriptive analytics helps the digital professional uncover business opportunities that would be either improbable or impractical to achieve through the use of human data analysis. Retailers must use big-data solutions to harbor vast quantities of data in a structured way, but it’s even more important to find where there are problems within the data that could be holding back sales. 

Companies can benefit from prescriptive analytics firms like DynamicAction, which runs a set of proprietary algorithms to find mistakes among retailers’ myriad and disparate data sets (e.g., site analytics, merchandising systems, content management systems) to provide recommendations on what the retailer specifically must address.

DynamicAction puts connected data, instant insights and prescribed action plans at the fingertips of retailers so they can answer critical questions and take immediate, optimized actions that directly impact profit growth. Retail teams know exactly where to focus, what to do and how much financial impact to expect.