Escher, a technology supplier to postal operators and couriers, has announced the launch of its new Retail Analytics solution.
The company claims the solution gives posts the power of real-time updates across their entire network, allowing them to make faster, more informed decisions from a single source of truth. The solution segments the sheer volume of information into digestible categories, including metrics related to cash and settlement, customer experience, compliance, productivity and efficiency, and more.
The company notes that among the most significant hurdles for postal operators is the incredible amount of data collected from across their retail networks every day. What has not evolved, though, are the reporting methods many posts still rely on. While many operators already leverage data analytics in some regards, it’s not always in the most efficient or effective ways due to the limited capability of available tools. These monthly, weekly or even daily snapshots are not enough to make the best decisions possible. Instead, it takes up-to-the-minute reporting with reliable data sets to keep up.
“In terms of delivering real business insight, postal operators need three things – real-time data you can trust, flexible delivery mechanics, and self-service discovery. Our new Retail Analytics solution offers this,” commented Nick Manolis, CEO, Escher.
“We provide postal operators with an in-depth snapshot of their current operations in real time, deliver actionable recommendations, and we make it incredibly easy to do.”
The solution also includes metrics to better understand the workforce, revenue and margin, and inventory, among many others. With access to real-time information, posts quickly learn more about their daily operations than ever before.
Escher explains that what brings accessibility to these data streams is Natural Language Processing (NLP), the same technology behind human-like responses from Alexa, Siri and other platforms. A feature of the new Retail Analytics solution is Ask Riposte – a tool that puts the power of natural language processing and AI on top of your data. With Ask Riposte, users simply pose a question and the correct answer will be returned.
The Retail Analytics solution, cloud-hosted in Microsoft Azure, receives data from a post’s installed Riposte platform. These two solutions securely sync in real time. A cloud data factory is harnessed to transform the data into a series of models that can be consumed by various BI and AI tools including Ask Riposte and Riposte AI.
