Meet the Partner! This Week, Meet Datitude

At Retail Assist, we pride ourselves on providing our customers with technology that meets their changing needs. However, sometimes a customer might be interested in pursuing technology in areas that are further afield and we’re always very happy to make a new introduction to one of our technology partners.

In this blog series, we go behind the scenes to talk to some of our partners to find out more about their software and how it links to our offering, too. This week, meet Datitude.

Hi Sarah! Tell us a bit about your role and your background. 

As co-director of Datitude, I am responsible for the commercial leadership of the company. It’s a really diverse role which incorporates the general management of the business, including client relationship management, team leadership and business development.

Prior to Datitude, I set up Fresca, another retail tech company, in 2000 and led it to become one of the UK’s leading e-commerce platforms, working with some of the UK’s best-known brands and retailers. Fresca was sold to BT Plc in 2008 and became part of BT Expedite’s retail solutions business. The early part of my career was spent working as an engineer and business manager in manufacturing.

Who are Datitude?

Datitude was established in 2012 by myself and co-director, Gavin Wilkinson. Given our previous roles and experience in omnichannel retailing and technology, we understood the challenges and opportunities that come with accessing and interpreting retail data quickly and easily to inform data-driven decisions and improve performance.

We recognised the need for fast, robust, trusted and easily accessible data analytics and so Datitude’s solution was born. It’s built on the principle that insight should drive action and the best decisions are made when an organisation’s data is easily accessible and understood, unrestricted by data silos, legacy IT systems or divisions in team structures and departments.

Using modern technologies, we’ve built a platform that brings together data sitting in disparate and separate silos and provides a unified, single view of customers, stock and sales across all channels, both on and offline.   

We’ve expanded over the years and built up a team of highly talented developers, data analysts and engineers to develop the platform into the most complete solution in the marketplace.

Datitude provides retailers with a customer and retail data platform. Could you tell us a bit more about the solution and why there’s a need for this in the current retail market?

Datitude is a fast, robust, customer and retail data platform that helps retailers and consumer businesses make sense of their data.  

It’s built using forward-thinking and modern tech stacks and is best of breed, incorporating technology such as Amazon Web Services, Tableau and an Excel add-in, plus proprietary technologies, making it fast, secure and scaleable to grow with a business.

Operating successfully in retail today depends on being able to extract value from trading and customer data, which in turn depends on tighter integration between the data and business intelligence systems. The urgency for better data, in real-time and on-demand, has further intensified with the accelerated shift to digital, global market disruptions and changing consumer behaviours. As customer journeys increasingly take place across multiple channels, a closer integration of online and physical stores is emerging. All of which requires a better understanding of the customer journey – the foundation of which is good, intelligent data based on modern architecture and analytics tools that are fast, reliable, secure, scalable and user-friendly. 

Most retailers still struggle to unify and exploit their vast volumes of data. As a result, they rely on key business reports that are not based on a single view of the truth, so no one is able to see the whole picture, or extract the key indicators that drive modern retail – customer data on lifetime value, acquisition, reactivation, retention, as well as commercial data on sales, returns and profit and loss.

A big challenge for retailers is integrating data from disparate sources – from multiple systems, to legacy system data integration and 3^rd-party data points. This often results in a patchwork of processes and systems that either aren’t fit for purpose, break frequently, or are costly to fix. The result is painfully slow access to the data which renders it out-of-date quickly, meaning retailers are basing today’s decisions on last week’s data. And this also causes mistrust in the data – if it’s not easily accessible, different departments may use different data sets or their own distinct reporting metrics, meaning no one has the single view of the truth upon which to base decisions.

What benefits does this platform bring and why should retailers have one?

Datitude’s customer and retail data platform joins the dots between disparate channels, systems, data silos, and brings the single source of insight needed by retailers, on-demand and in real-time, to improve their performance across functions and departments.

A single view of the truth means it’s the same curated data, accessible to everyone, sliced and diced to meet different needs. It provides a unified focus on both trading and customer data, enabling greater collaboration across departments and more informed, data-driven decision making.  

Dynamic reports, dashboards and hands-on analytics are easy to use with a variety of front-end interfaces that are easy to see with BI, reports and analytics built in and automated as standard, along with visualisations and sophisticated interactive dashboards.

If retailers need real-time, accurate and actionable insight into trading patterns, marketing campaign performance and customer behaviour, including accurate segmentation, channel attribution, customer acquisition, retention and engagement analytics in one managed solution, Datitude’s platform is the most complete, single-managed, solution in the marketplace.

How does Datitude work with Retail Assist?

Datitude has enjoyed a successful collaborative relationship with Retail Assist over many years. As well as providing bespoke business intelligence and data analytics solutions for Retail Assist client projects, we work closely on systems integrations as a number of our clients use Retail Assist’s solutions, such as Merret Pro and OMIO PIM.