Ideas, information and industry news for collegiate retailers

For University of California Davis Stores Associate Director of Finance Tracy Roman, a college store system is incomplete without a superb business intelligence tool. Ms. Roman was among the first to test drive the latest iteration of Dashboard, the real-time analytics tool for college stores that integrates with the MBS system. We sat down to talk to Ms. Roman about how business intelligence is shaping the future of campus bookstores.

Ray Karasek, Community College of Rhode Island’s Auxiliary Services Director, calls the Dashboard analytics suite “the Ferrari of MBS.”

In today’s technology-fueled world customer loyalty isn’t a given. If your store doesn’t have what someone is looking for, they can shop somewhere else with just a cell phone and a few taps on the screen. Customers expect stores to meet their needs without expressing what they want. On the surface, the problem looks impossible. You can’t read your customer’s mind—or can you?

A common theme shared among college store personnel is the desire to have more communication between faculty and the store staff. Benefits to the faculty include students prepared with the proper course materials on time, and to the store, having the materials readily available in several cost-saving formats and options.

Once students return to class from Thanksgiving, the countdown is on for the extended holiday break. Lasting anywhere from two weeks to more than a month, students are counting the days until they have time away from the books.

Whether it's more social engagement, more regular foot traffic or higher online sell-through, all college stores want more interaction points with our customers.

The secret to achieving it lies in data.

You make business decisions daily, sometimes based on a gut feeling or a dinner conversation from the night before. How much product should I order? What will my sales look like tomorrow? Do I have enough people on the schedule? Making the wrong call can not only cost you money, it can lay the foundation for you going out of business.

We talk a lot about big data and business intelligence, and how these things can help you make better and more informed business decisions. The process of how that data is controlled in your store and on your campus — plus who has access to each data set — can be equally important to ensuring things are running smoothly and everyone is on the same page. While the concept of data governance may sound overly complicated or lack the excitement of what your data itself represents, Forbes argues that having a good system of governance in place can make all the difference in developing and utilizing actionable insights from your data.

Big data, business intelligence, analytics reporting. There are plenty of nuanced buzzwords in retail, but they all tell us the same thing: if you want to make the best, most informed decisions for your store, you need to analyze and understand your store's data and information. There are plenty of tools and methods out there available, but not all are created equal. According to a recent article shared at Retail Minded, there are some common BI mistakes retailers are making that can cost them in the long run.

In a long-anticipated move, Instragram officially announced its new tools for business users this week. Now businesses such as your campus store can create business profiles, use improved BI analytics and create posts as ads, boosting your visibility and driving traffic toward your store and website. While there are a few quirks — only users who have already set up a business page on Facebook will be able to create a business profile on Instagram, for example — these tools should go a long way in reaching today's college-aged consumers.