Muji takes on cloud platform to increase sales

Retailer Muji is using a cloud-based platform from IT services firm Infosys to help it understand customers and target sales.

The Japanese retailer has adopted the Indian supplier’s InteractEdge platform, which provides big data analytics and advanced machine-learning algorithms so retailers can understand customers and tailor offers to them. Customers automatically receive appropriate offers via email and a mobile app.

Takashi Okutani, general manager of the web business division at Muji, said the company can now collect information about customers’ purchase trends and activity data including offline store data. 

“In today's omni-channel age, we were looking for a tool which would centrally manage data from both Internet and physical stores and become a part of our marketing automation strategy that aims to serve our customers better,” said Okutani.

Muji is using a personalised recommendation tool from Infosys. “This implementation has enabled us to provide automatic recommendation of products via [Muji Pssport mobile app] to customers who don’t have access to the online store, based on their purchase history in physical stores and across the omni-channel environment.”

InteractEdge is part of Infosys’ platform as a service (PaaS) range of products, which includes the company's ProcureEdge procurement platform, BrandEdge marketing system and CreditEdge financial services offering, which are delivered via a private cloud.

When Muji first started collecting and analysing customer data several years ago, the operation was straightforward. Point-of-sale and e-commerce data was sent into an Amazon Redshift cloud storage system, and accessed and analysed either in a Tableau system or Microsoft Excel. But Muji Passport made things more complicated.