First Insight Expands Product Testing Platform for Greater Scale
First Insight Inc. has upgraded its voice of customer analytics program to allow retailers and brands to test high volumes of products each year. The company said the platform now features “enterprise-grade” management and integration capabilities. Essentially, it’s the original testing solution but on steroids.
First Insight will be demonstrating the solutions at NRF’s Big Show in New York City next week.
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The company said in a statement that this upgraded version will enable retailers “to develop, buy, price and market products with unprecedented scale and security.” Retailers and brands have been using First Insight’s voice of customer analytics to test and price products across product categories to garner higher sell-through and with better margins.
The company said the new capabilities allow companies to test “high volumes of new products each year.”
“The solution enhancements also deliver a deeper understanding of the products customers will buy and why they buy them, including attribute-level analytics and tools to assess the interaction between items within an assortment,” the company noted.
Greg Petro, chief executive officer of First Insight, said through the company’s work with retailers, brands and manufacturers, the firm “has developed an understanding of what is required to provide an enterprise-level platform capable of delivering significant and measurable ROI.”
“Today, First Insight is the only platform performing digital testing of tens of thousands of products annually for our retail partners,” Petro added. “Operating at that scale requires mission-critical analytics and integration capabilities. We continue to invest heavily in our solution and are excited to extend our platform with these enhancements.”
The expanded solution features new product testing “that seamlessly integrates within the retail ecosystem” while offering an “advanced API for integrating InsightSuite with product lifecycle management systems and other data repositories,” the company said, adding that the integrations will help “streamline workflow and enable customer feedback to be incorporated throughout the process — from initial product concept to manufacture/buy to inventory allocation.”
Other features of the upgraded platform include “aggregated dashboard analytics and tagging,” which aims to improve testing processes. “Executives, merchants, designers and planners can now quickly view graphical reports regarding system utilization, test item scores and decisions made per test item — mapped over time and filtered by department, category, season, brand or channel,” First Insight said. “New tagging capabilities allow for streamlined searches of items and insights and for real-time reporting. All of these capabilities are designed to maximize the return on investment of the First Insight solution.”
Other notable features include compliance with various security standards — including global ones such as GDPR. The new capabilities also allow product attribute testing, which “enables designers and merchants to learn what to change about an item in order to improve its performance — for example, color, pattern, material or silhouette. The solution also lets retailers know which specific attributes resonate with customers,” the company said.
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