Symphony RetailAI: A New Frontier in CPG
Pallab Chatterjee, CEO Consumer behavior is changing by the day and markets across the board are riding this tide of change to evolve and meet the needs of the modern day consumer; the realm of Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) is no different. Digital disruption has made its way into the CPG and retail space, far and wide, and is impelling legacy brands to radically reconsider the way they view production, distribution, and consumption in the digital age. Outmoded sales and distribution models fall back when it comes to meeting the needs of the younger, more tech-savvy demographic. Against this challenging backdrop, Texas-based Symphony RetailAI is helping FMCG retailers and CPG manufacturers drive validated growth with its leading-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled decision platforms, solutions, and customer-centric insights. From customer intelligence, personalized marketing, merchandising and category management, all the way to supply chain and retail operations, Symphony RetailAI is innovating rapidly to drive faster, more profitable decisions through AI, machine learning and voice technologies. The company’s CEO, Pallab Chatterjee remarks, “We are focused right now on four roles in retail: the category manager, marketing manager, store manager, and supply chain manager. Our whole theme in retail is, how we can make people in each of these roles smarter to give our customers an unfair advantage,” Chatterjee said."We thought people are getting used to Alexa and Siri at home, so why can’t there be a conversational interface at work"
Reinvigorating CPG and FMCG Sales
In the growing competitive retail and CPG space, smart marketers are well aware of the fact that their customers are just a click away from shopping somewhere else. What marketers need to rethink is whether they really know their customers, their shopping habits, and preferences. Symphony RetailAI’s AI-enabled, retail-specific marketing platform enables retailers to go beyond conventional methods and endorse novel approaches to let customers know that they are listening intently to their needs. “For big retailers, 30 to 40 percent of promotions are ineffective and they know it, but they don’t know which ones and they don’t know what to do about it,” mentions the CEO. To this end, the company has recently introduced its SR Personalized MarketingAI solution leveraging which FMCG retailers can deliver customized messages and offers to each buyer in real time while achieving a 360-degree view of their consumer data. At the core of the solution is an intelligent, predictive analytics engine that empowers retailers with considerable improvements in redemption rate, participation rate, and sales lift.
With AI underpinning all of CINDE’s actions, the next-gen digital assistant can understand cause and recommend best actions along with turning challenges into opportunities
Upon deploying the ingenious AI capabilities, retailers can automate the process of customization, which in turn increases the accuracy, scale, and timeliness of the offers they share with their customers, earning their brand loyalty in the process.
Keeping that unfair advantage in mind, which Chatterjee believes is the key to retaining customers, Symphony RetailAI has brought to the table a first-of-its-kind AI-enabled digital assistant—CINDE—for hard goods and grocery retailers, completely transforming the way retailers work. With CINDE, an acronym for Conversational INsights and Decision Engine, retailers can get answers to different sales- and customer-related questions—store, category, or product wise. For instance, retailers can ask “How is category X performing in X store?” or “What are customers usually going for instead of product X?” Processing billions of bits of data in real time, CINDE efficiently mines trends and anomalies to serve up accurate answers in seconds, which would otherwise take hours, days, or even weeks by analysts. Leveraging highly advanced contextual analytics, CINDE can understand questions, evaluate the data, and then glean insights while selecting the most effective visualizations. Chatterjee quips, “We thought people are getting used to Alexa and Siri at home, so why can’t there be a conversational interface at work.” With AI underpinning all of CINDE’s actions, the next-gen digital assistant can understand cause and recommend best actions along with turning challenges into opportunities. In addition, CINDE’s strong forecasting capabilities optimize and suggest the best promotions to run depending on AI-based forecasting models. Besides alerting retailers to plummeting sales, she informs them of the direct impact of promotions on sales. This, in turn, eliminates all the guesswork and saves marketers significant time and money as misaligned promotions often lead to exorbitant budgetary considerations in organizations.
In terms of AI-enabled demand forecasting, the company’s SR Demand ForecastingAI utilizes machine learning and contextual data to build models that remove the manual guesswork and improve forecast accuracy. Reducing inventory and spoilage, decreasing out of stocks, and gaining a better understanding of sales patterns and anomalies at a granular level, SR Demand ForecastingAI efficiently optimizes product availability. The solution also considerably accelerates forecasting speed while enhancing efficiency and accuracy using machine-learning algorithms that are unique to specific data sets.
Moreover, SR Demand ForecastingAI pulls in contextual data and external variables like seasonality, calendar of events, and even the weather to equip marketers with accurate forecasts. With SR Demand ForecastingAI, retailers can efficiently manage fresh farm forecasting while delivering daily and intra-day forecasts for in-store food production services, providing unprecedented accuracy.
Defining Strategic Growth for CPG Manufacturers
To help CPG account managers work smarter with fewer missed opportunities and mistakes, Symphony RetailAI brings a cutting-edge solution—SR Retailer Collaboration—designed to enable manufacturers and retailer to get on the same page. Supporting joint business and category management planning, the solution optimizes market spend, establishes a shared platform for manufacturer-retailer collaboration, provides a unified view of insights to align activities, and supports more customer-centric decisions.
For CPG category managers, Symphony RetailAI provides SR Joint Business Planning and SR Assortment & Space. The SR Joint Business Planning solution simulates the process consulting and best practices while combining strategic planning with execution to enhance productivity and growth for both retailers and manufacturers. This increases efficiency allowing manufacturers to ten times the number of joint business plans, increasing shopper satisfaction and sales in the process. On the other hand, SR Assortment & Space solution empowers CPGs to determine growth opportunities and generate store-ready planograms and assortments that customer-, inventory-, and ‘shelf’- aware.
To cater to the needs of CPG brand managers, Symphony RetailAI has introduced the SR Consumer & Brand Insights and SR Product Innovation+ solutions. While the former helps managers gain a comprehensive view of target customers, executing meaningful brand experiences across all major platforms, the latter assist them with the feedback from a large segment of customers while also tracking launches and identifying opportunities for improving success rates of products.
Symphony RetailAI’s cross-media insights solutions enable CPG marketing managers to connect the dot between the cross-platform media exposure of customers and their actual buying behavior. The company’s SR Channel Advertising solution allows brands to connect with retailers’ shoppers by offering co-branded, data-driven, digital advertising with closed-loop attribution and measurement.
Striding ahead in full steam, Symphony RetailAI is laser-focused on developing solutions that address the pain-points retailers and CPG manufacturers face in their daily operations and also the ones that they are not ready for. Trusted by over 1200 organizations that include 15 of the world’s 25 largest grocery retailers and thousands of retail brands, the company is looking at taking a deeper dive into AI, machine learning, and voice technologies to help CPG manufacturers and retailers drive more profitable decisions.
Defining Strategic Growth for CPG Manufacturers
To help CPG account managers work smarter with fewer missed opportunities and mistakes, Symphony RetailAI brings a cutting-edge solution—SR Retailer Collaboration—designed to enable manufacturers and retailer to get on the same page. Supporting joint business and category management planning, the solution optimizes market spend, establishes a shared platform for manufacturer-retailer collaboration, provides a unified view of insights to align activities, and supports more customer-centric decisions.
For CPG category managers, Symphony RetailAI provides SR Joint Business Planning and SR Assortment & Space. The SR Joint Business Planning solution simulates the process consulting and best practices while combining strategic planning with execution to enhance productivity and growth for both retailers and manufacturers. This increases efficiency allowing manufacturers to ten times the number of joint business plans, increasing shopper satisfaction and sales in the process. On the other hand, SR Assortment & Space solution empowers CPGs to determine growth opportunities and generate store-ready planograms and assortments that customer-, inventory-, and ‘shelf’- aware.
To cater to the needs of CPG brand managers, Symphony RetailAI has introduced the SR Consumer & Brand Insights and SR Product Innovation+ solutions. While the former helps managers gain a comprehensive view of target customers, executing meaningful brand experiences across all major platforms, the latter assist them with the feedback from a large segment of customers while also tracking launches and identifying opportunities for improving success rates of products.
Symphony RetailAI’s cross-media insights solutions enable CPG marketing managers to connect the dot between the cross-platform media exposure of customers and their actual buying behavior. The company’s SR Channel Advertising solution allows brands to connect with retailers’ shoppers by offering co-branded, data-driven, digital advertising with closed-loop attribution and measurement.
Striding ahead in full steam, Symphony RetailAI is laser-focused on developing solutions that address the pain-points retailers and CPG manufacturers face in their daily operations and also the ones that they are not ready for. Trusted by over 1200 organizations that include 15 of the world’s 25 largest grocery retailers and thousands of retail brands, the company is looking at taking a deeper dive into AI, machine learning, and voice technologies to help CPG manufacturers and retailers drive more profitable decisions.
Company
Symphony RetailAI
Headquarters
Addison, TX
Management
Pallab Chatterjee, CEO
Description
Symphony RetailAI is helping FMCG retailers and CPG manufacturers with its leading-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled decision platforms, solutions, and customer-centric insights
