In today’s rapidly evolving market, businesses always seek innovative solutions to gain competitive advantage and amplify success. AI-powered tools have emerged as key drivers to streamline sales processes and unlock new avenues for growth. In this blog, we explore how integrating advanced AI technology has transformed a global non-alcoholic beverage company’s business outcome – enhancing customer satisfaction, expanding market reach, and empowering sales teams with vital insights.
Envision this – a leading non-alcoholic beverage company offering a wide range of carbonated and non-carbonated drinks that are enjoyed daily by millions worldwide, now on a task to maximize its revenue for foodservice channel through intelligent product assortment and innovative strategies.
Enter the game-changer – Artificial Intelligence!
The Challenge: An Opportunity for Growth
AI is fast becoming the backbone of countless success stories across industries. In the ever-growing world of beverage, staying ahead of consumer preferences and ensuring efficient operations can be a real challenge. With its ability to analyze vast amounts of data, AI provides crucial insights that can transform decision-making processes.
Despite their established global market position, our client faced significant obstacles. Identifying the best and most effective product recommendations for both existing and upcoming lines was proving to be a tough job, especially when trying to address potential sales gaps across different regions and outlets. Their traditional and manual approach of gathering insights resulted in slow response times and inept product assortment. This not only hurt profitability but also increased wastage, something that directly conflicted with their commitment to sustainability.
Additionally, they couldn’t leverage the full potential of the vast amount of data acquired through IoT, consumption patterns, demographic information, and outlet footfalls. The prerequisite to uplift their business was clear – they needed an intelligent, data-driven solution to help them make informed decisions and drive revenue growth.
A New Era of Product Assortment, Powered by AI
Want to keep your customers keep coming back? Personalization is the key. AI allows companies to deep dive into customer data, identify purchasing patterns and consumer preferences. With these insights handy, think tailored marketing efforts, targeted promotions, personalized recommendations, and enhanced customer experience. The result? A notable uptick in customer satisfaction and loyalty.
It was thus a no-brainer decision to harness the power of data and AI to revolutionize the client’s business operations and product assortment approach. Infogain’s Data & AI Studio engineered an advanced AI-driven analytics solution, powered by its NAVIK Sales AI platform, that leverages deep neural nets, collaborative filtering, and ensemble models to deliver intelligent product and assortment recommendations.
By integrating diverse data sources—including shipments, consumption statistics, research surveys, and demographic details—this innovative Predictive AI model assessed a staggering 35 billion data points to deliver optimal recommendations tailored for the client’s vast network of restaurants.
How it Works
At the core of this transformation are digital twins – that essentially created a virtual replica of each outlet of the restaurant chain. By creating these digital twins, the AI engine provides highly specific recommendations based on unique purchase patterns of each restaurant. It can also predict expected sales volumes for every single product based on purchase probability and various SKU and category recommendation drivers. But that’s not all. This platform was designed to evolve and scale, generating future use cases that included identifying ideal outlets for new product launches, offering pricing recommendations, optimizing drinks menus, and improving promotional effectiveness.
Transformative Results: From Insight to Action
The impact of this AI-powered solution has been significant. By applying advanced cross-selling and up-selling techniques, the company witnessed substantial revenue growth and improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. The decision makers are now equipped with deeper insights into customer needs, enabling more effective and customized sales strategies.
Sales isn’t always just about numbers; it’s also about people. This newfound capability has empowered the sales leaders to make data-driven decisions swiftly, resulting in improved selling.
Highlights
For their top 50 QSR chains, our client witnessed:
- 3% incremental revenue over baseline measured with a controlled trial group. .
- Around 3% increase in annual gross profit.
Rebooting Business Operation, Driving Sustainability and Revenue Growth
This project marked an important milestone for the beverage company by being the first large-scale AI-powered implementation, positively impacting over 550 users across diverse departments.
Beyond just sales growth, this solution played a crucial role in minimizing beverage wastage through optimal predictions and assortment suggestions. It also helped streamline the supply chain by reducing the frequency of vehicle trips to outlets. As a result, the environmental impact was reduced, allowing the company to meet its sustainability goals.
The Path to Future Success
The successful implementation of this AI-driven tool in the client’s U.S. food service channel has paved the way for further expansion into other regions. In Canada, Infogain’s team successfully deployed a real-time insights module, while in Australia, the platform laid the groundwork for assessing promotional effectiveness. Additionally, we are extending the platform to the convenience retail channel in the US.
In conclusion, the integration of advanced technology like AI into traditional ecosystems, companies are not only transforming their businesses while boosting customer experiences and profitability, but they are also taking bolder steps towards building a more sustainable and responsible business practices.
So, are you ready to raise a glass to the future of business? The AI revolution has just begun!
Author Name: Harshit Parikh, Senior Vice President, Infogain
