How technology platforms use demand intelligence to streamline labor management
Technology is playing a foundational business role in 2022 and beyond
With global IT spending on enterprise software expected to reach $672 billion in 2022 alone, technology platforms are becoming an integral part of businesses across industries. Application, web, and mobile platforms have transformed the way customers interact with companies during every part of the sales cycle– and the market for these platforms is only becoming more saturated.
So how do technology platforms ensure they stand out as a must-have among an endless sea of options that all promise to improve operations? Let’s explore how platforms that focus on labor management who service retailers, hoteliers, and restaurants are using demand intelligence to deepen their offering and bring greater value to their users.
Employers are updating labor management practices to appeal to an internet-savvy workforce
In 2019, hourly workers accounted for well over half of all wage and salary employees across the United States. As younger, more tech-centered generations enter the workforce in the form of hourly wage jobs, employers in retail, hospitality, and many other industries are using technology to appeal to a more digitized workforce.
Thanks to web and mobile apps that simplify labor management, employees can now clock in and out, adjust their weekly schedules, communicate with managers, and even complete required training with tools and systems enabled by new technology. And for good reason– as we’re seeing the highest increase in labor costs since 2001, the time to focus on labor optimization is now.
There’s also the pandemic-era trend of hourly workers leaving their positions in search of better gigs– and given how accessible it is to apply for jobs online and more opportunities in remote work , it’s never been easier for them to do so.
Competitive employers across industries know this, and they're looking for ways to manage labor costs in an efficient, consistent way. This becomes increasingly difficult as unexpected fluctuations in demand change their staffing needs seemingly by the end of each business day.
For example—based on their own historical data—a big box retailer generally knows what to expect in terms of demand when it comes to known holidays and big events near them. It's the lesser known events that they don't know to search for that may double or even triple demand on those days– and being short staffed during those moments of peak demand means lost revenue opportunities, unnecessary overtime pay, a stressed-out workforce, and a lackluster customer experience.
The technology platforms that help these companies better predict and manage their labor are going to succeed. But they need the most up to date information to ensure they can provide accurate information to their end customers.
How technology platforms use intelligent event data to transform labor optimization
It’s no secret that aligning retail staffing levels with incoming demand can improve sales performance. Studies show that for one retailer, right-sizing their staff in 168 stores over six months earned them an increase of $7.4 million in annual profits, after accounting for the additional labor costs.
That’s why technology platforms use demand intelligence to drive better business outcomes for their customers, with some such as Legion Technologies already providing users with 98% accuracy in their labor forecasts thanks to PredictHQ.
Legion Technologies is an AI-powered workforce management platform that’s revolutionizing the way hourly workers interact with their employers. It uses artificial intelligence to ensure restaurants provide the right number of staff at the right time, enabling employers to eliminate labor inefficiencies and boost employee engagement.
Legion predicts labor demand based on a forecast of sales or traffic at each location, down to 30-minute increments. When it comes to this level of precision, integrating raw event data that without the proper verification and enrichment can ruin your models. To rely on event data for demand forecasting, you need a lot more than an event’s promotional copy. Here's what Thomas Joseph, Head of Data Science at Legion has to say on the importance of data quality for accurate forecasting:
“The quality of forecasts is directly related to high-quality data. If data quality is poor, forecasts will be off, which means schedules—fed by forecasts—will be sub-optimal, costing companies a lot of money.”
By integrating our intelligent, forecast-grade event data, they’ve improved accuracy for their demand forecasts, and opened up new possibilities for their users. Read Legion’s customer story for more on how they leverage demand intelligence to enhance their platform offering.
Data quality is the most important factor when choosing an event data provider
When ingesting data into your machine learning models, quality makes the difference between accurate predictions that build trust with your user base, and a hit-or-miss user experience that leads to missed opportunities. The good news is our data scientists have built 1,000+ machine learning models to ensure the quality and accuracy of our data, so you don’t need to worry about it.
As the leading source of intelligent event data, PredictHQ understands the critical importance of providing trusted, reliable datasets. Our demand intelligence API finds, verifies, and enriches half a million events every month– each of which goes through a rigorous pipeline to address errors including:
Wrong event state- Postponed or cancelled events, yet their status is still listed as active
Virtual events- Online events that don’t drive physical attendance or footfall
Incorrect event size- Most providers predict attendance and event size based on seat capacity alone, which isn’t indicative of how many people will truly be there
Duplicates- Even one duplicate listing can throw off forecasts way off. Ex. the expected demand for one event of 20,000 people vs. two of them on the very same day
Spam- Spam events are becoming harder to track as bots flood the internet with ads in event form
Not only do we clean the data, we standardize it into a single format so even large data sets are easy to manage. We’re the only data provider that offers accurate predicted end times for scheduled, ticketed events– including accurate predicted attendance.
Give your users a more complete picture of what’s impacting their business by ingesting the world’s most trusted source of event data. Join the ranks of technology platforms that now have one less dataset to worry about. Our data scientists are happy to answer your questions, and help you start leveraging demand intelligence to drive better outcomes for your customers.
