Decoding customer pattern in a retail outlet with Tableau

Image Courtesy: Magic POS

Tableau by default has a saved data source that mimics a retail outlet’s sales’ data, which is like a laboratory for trials and tests before implementing an analysis for a wider audience. The data has sales records for customers in US region with product categories as Technology, Office Supplies and Furniture, which further drills down to sub-categories, manufacturers and products with orders since 2015. This is a fine mix to create any proof of concepts and customer pattern analysis being one of them. The data captures customer names data for each order placed, hence can be used to find patterns in customers in terms of duration of association with the store and also segmentation of customers based on profitability.

Finding the trends in customer association with a retail store to drive sales and profitability by…

Hosted on Tableau Public

The customer segmentation is based on the flow diagram below.

The results of the segment selection as shown above and customer count ’N’ from the parameters in top left, can be seen in the scatter plot underneath, which shows the top N profitable customers.

Drill Down Pie Chart

There is a click action embedded in the customer names in the scatter plot that shows the customer details on the charts in the right. The category and sub category wise split is shown using the drill through enabled pie chart.

Follow the steps in the video to recreate pie chart with drill down feature.

Difference between values for Max and Min dates

This section is about understanding the performance of sub-categories in attracting customers over time, which like customer segmentation, can be categorized into buckets. This is achieved using LOD expressions (Find explanation here) to get the max and min corresponding to each date for each sub-category. Finally the view is shown using line chart as well as US state level map to understand the geographical spread as well.

Cross tab with max and min customer count for sub-categories across years

In Summary, we can focus on questions like who are the most loyal and profitable customers and their ordering frequency and buying choices or who are the most profitable but discontinued customers. This can equip us to create specific marketing and promotional strategies to elevate the lagging areas.