When Clearview Consulting Group faced escalating data challenges, their partnership with AnswerRocket boosted efficiency, enabling real-time insights and significant client savings.
Months for a Clearview client to achieve $150M cost savings
about cLEARVIEW CONSULTING GROUP
Founded by Meredith Najewicz and Allen Welch, Clearview Consulting Group is a niche firm that specializes in evaluating consumer product performance. For nearly two decades, they’ve pioneered this industry, driving improvements for retailers and manufacturers while offering insights to maximize profits. Clearview has since expanded beyond its DIY roots, now assessing Automotive, Sporting Goods, Electronics, and any sector where performance is paramount.
industry
Consulting
location
Atlanta, GA
Company size
20+
solution
GenAI Analytics
The Problem
As Clearview continued to grow, the volume and complexity of their data increased exponentially. Evaluating thousands of products annually across various categories created vast data sets that traditional tools like Excel could no longer handle efficiently. The need to provide real-time, actionable insights from this data to their clients became a critical challenge. Manual data processing was time-consuming, labor-intensive, and prone to errors, making it difficult for Clearview to meet the dynamic needs of major retailers and manufacturers.
Why They Chose AnswerRocket
Clearview needed a robust, adaptable solution that could handle the sheer volume and variety of data they were collecting. After exploring various options, including Tableau and Qlik, Allen looked into AnswerRocket. AnswerRocket stood out for its hands-on consulting and custom development services, which enabled Clearview to create a specialized AI assistant for product data analysis.
For us, it was the collaboration we had with AnswerRocket. We had a vision, it was all basically in my head, we started showing them and sketching it out and they had the same mindset that I had, “Yeah, we can do that.” You can’t do it all yourself, there has to be teams. Partnership with people that do understand and can adapt and are willing to work with you, for us, that sold it for us.
allen welch managing director
AnswerRocket’s GenAI analytics platform, powered by LLMs like GPT-4, allows users the ability to explore data via a chat-based interface. This means that users at the retailer and buyer level, regardless of their background or technical abilities are able to ask questions of Clearview’s data and instantly receive robust insights in return.
The example below shows the results of the prompt, “show me the blowers report” which returns every blower available across all major retailers with their specs in just seconds compared to hours/days to build by hand.
The partnership with AnswerRocket promised to automate data processing, integrate consumer insights, and provide a scalable solution to manage and analyze vast amounts of product data efficiently.
How They Are Using AnswerRocket
Clearview leverages AnswerRocket’s platform in several critical ways:
1) Data Collection and Processing:
Clearview gathers data from various retailers on a routine basis, covering products from brick-and-mortar, omni-channel, and online giants like Amazon.
AnswerRocket’s AI engine processes this data to provide a comprehensive view of product specifications and performance.
2) Consumer Insights Integration:
The platform generates top consumer metrics, helping retailers understand what features matter most to their customers.
Clearview conducts their own product testing and partners with labs to enrich the data, ensuring it is accurate and actionable.
3) Competitive Analysis and Product Line Reviews (PLRs):
Clearview uses AnswerRocket to automate the creation of competitive analysis reports, reducing the time required from days to minutes.
This capability allows clients to make informed decisions about their product assortments, pricing strategies, and vendor negotiations.
What They’ve Achieved
By integrating AnswerRocket into their operations, Clearview has transformed their business, providing significant benefits to their clients:
Efficiency Gains: The time to create competitive analyses and comp shops has been reduced from days to minutes, saving labor costs and increasing productivity. With large retailers performing 400-500 competitive analyses a year, the impact is monumental. This change represents about an 85% increase in efficiency in creating these competitive analysis reports.
Scalable Data Management: Clearview can now handle vast amounts of data across multiple categories and regions, providing real-time updates and insights.
Enhanced Decision-Making: Retail clients can access detailed, up-to-date product performance data, enabling them to make better buying decisions and optimize their assortments.
Impact Statistics
A Home Improvement Product Retailer: Clearview’s data-driven insights helped this home improvement product retailer save approximately $1.3 billion over a five-year period by optimizing product assortments and negotiating better vendor terms.
A Retailer and Distributor of Automotive Parts: Clearview’s data analysis and insights enabled a retailer and distributor of automotive parts to achieve a $150 million cost-saving goal in just 20 months, significantly ahead of their three-year target. This was accomplished by using Clearview’s comprehensive product evaluations and competitive analysis to optimize their product mix, streamline inventory management, and negotiate more favorable terms with suppliers, ultimately improving operational efficiency and reducing costs.
Private Brands: A home improvement product retailer reported a $600 million impact over seven years due to Clearview’s data-driven approach to product performance evaluation. This impact was achieved by using Clearview’s detailed product performance data to enhance their private brand offerings, ensuring they met consumer expectations and outperformed competitors in quality and value.
Conclusion
Clearview’s collaboration with AnswerRocket has been a game-changer, enabling them to handle complex data with ease and provide unmatched insights to their clients. The adoption of AnswerRocket’s AI-driven analytics has not only enhanced Clearview’s efficiency but also significantly boosted the ROI for their clients, solidifying Clearview’s position as a leader in product performance evaluation.
