During our first meeting this week, I had a few thoughts for topics which I could not fit on our index card. For reference, I work in a multiple unit retail environment so this round of ideas is focused on customer and store analysis work that is useful for my vertical. I think the concepts expand out to other industries, though, in some manner.
CUSTOMER TRANSACTIONS
1. Purchase patterns: a) First Purchase, b) Last Purchase, c) Second to Last Purchase, d) Calculate the time between those transactions.
2. New/Lost/Lapsed buyers: a) Is a customer new, b) Is a customer existing, c) Has the customer stopped showing up, d) Use a variable time span to identify customers that have not returned in X years/months.
3. Retention: a) What is our percent of one time, two time, three time, three time plus buyers over a user selected time period
4. Customer values: a) What is the lifetime value of a customer, b) What is the lifetime value of a customer who first bought product A, versus those who first bought product B, c) At what point is a customer likely to leave, meaning after X months/years is there a patterned decline.
STORE INFORMATION
1. What is the life cycle of a store - when does a store move from new to mature, and is there a point of decline?
2. How many customers cross shop my locations? How loyal are customers to their closest store location?
3. What is the average distance a customer drives to reach a given store?
These are just some rough thoughts - I'd be happy to talk through these more if that would help explain what I mean by any of them.
Mike Symon
I didn't get to attend the last meeting, but I'm interested in meeting with others to help me ramp up my Tableau skills (I'm pretty much brand new to it). I have a lot of economic information I want to report on, particularly for forecasting machine tool sales. I am also using Tableau for my company's sales data.
One item I would be interested in using historical trends in my company's sales data to forecast the current year. For example, I know the historic pattern by which we book advertising for the upcoming/current year. We track the day the order was booked and when that order will be delivered (e.g. the January 2015 issue of one of our magazines or a banner for February on of our websites). I've created a chart that compares years with the running total of advertising booked based on how many days prior to the end of the year that amount was booked. Sorry, it's hard for me to explain this in words. Hopefully the picture below helps.
In Excel, I used to use the percent of the year total booked as of a given date to forecast the current year total projection. But, it was hard to do this for anything of the total company since there were too many other variables to manipulate (by brand, by product, by sales person, etc.). If I could get this set up in Tableau, then I could simply filter filter on the various dimensions to see where each one currently stands relative to previous years as well as projected total compared to budget. Another interesting item to be added to the viz is a list of the top 10 or 20 customers that advertised in previous years but we don't have a schedule for the current year yet.
