Today, First Insight released Newton, the latest version of Virtual Customer Viewpoint (VCV), the only solution forreliably predicting sales, volume, and margin performance of trend- and innovation-driven merchandise with no sales history. As First Insight's flagship SaaS solution, VCV now brings intelligence collected directly from customers to bear on assortment decisions.
Designers and merchants armed with VCV have a marked advantage. Products they put into assortments represent their best bet to deliver financial and volume goals promised in their company's earnings guidance.
At First Insight's fourth major release of VCV, Newton reflects the success of our rapid development program. Newton adds significant capabilities for designers and merchants in retail and consumer product brands. Its foremost advances include:
- Support for assorment decision making. VCV now supports decision-making critical for successful assortments based on its measurement of item strength and gross margin. Merchants can easily create, modify, and save alternative assortments and compare them on key metrics. What-if analysis of ticket price, cost, and other dimensions rollup to plan aggregates. Assorments can be calibrated to regional markets.
- Advanced analytic modeling and visualization. VCV now enables drilldown of analytic findings by demographic and geographic variables. Improved visualization gives decision makers more information in simpler formats. Newton improves VCV forecasts based on consumers who demonstrate the ability to spot trends in micro?merchandise segments.
- Faster, scalable performance. Technical improvements in VCV enable faster calculations and data manipulation essential for rapid analysis of alternative plans with hundreds of SKUs per class.
- Enhanced game distribution and management. Newton improves viral distribution of First Insight’s growing portfolio of casual games, our innovative method to collect data from customers, consumers, and store associates. Our games fully support distribution through our customers’ websites, CRM channels, and social networks. Game distribution management is faster, easier, and better with the ability to target and version games for different populations.
- Improved game flexibility. Newton provides new flexibility to customize questions for segmenting analytics by demographics, psychographics, and consumer behaviors. For example, behavioral segmentation can be based on consumers’ preferences for retailers and other shopping patterns.
- Additional role and workflow support. A new merchant homepage provides one click access to key predictive analytics for product, attributes, and trends. Decision makers can now more easily get customer insights in a fraction of the time. Role enforcement allows an entire team to access the detail and controls who can see what inside of the system.
“Newton marks another milestone in our ability to support better decisions,” commented Greg Petro, principle founder and CEO of First Insight. “Getting merchandise and assortments right at the front end lies at the heart of retail success.” A former merchant himself, he added, “Financial plans are empty promises until merchants and designers put products customers want in them. Now with VCV they have a superior tool to identify category opportunities and evaluate and select products customers will buy.”
“Newton delivers more capabilities than planned ahead of schedule,” stated Aaron Brauser, First Insight’s vice president for products. “The additional functionality we’ve delivered rests on key technical improvements,” Brauser continued. “Delivering this release ahead of schedule demonstrates our commitment to superior software lifecycle management and great leverage of our U.S. and Indian teams.”
“VCV gives our customers predictive merchandise analytics they’ve never had in a simple, selfevident tool that fits the way merchants and designers work—quickly and intuitively,” noted Greg Girard, First Insight’s vice president for marketing. “First Insight lets consumers engage their favorite brands where it matters, in deciding what items the brand will sell to earn their loyalty,” he said.
