In the Kazakh retail market, companies are increasingly thinking about digitalization as a tool to reduce operating costs and manage risks. This is especially true for chain stores, where it is important to control the quality of service, minimize losses and better understand customers.

Over the past two years, ProNovation Solutions has implemented a number of projects for retail in the DIY and interior goods segment. In this article, we will talk about key cases, what tasks clients came with, and which IT tools proved to be the most effective.

One of the major clients, a federal chain of construction and paint materials stores, faced the problem of repeated customer visits without being recorded in CRM. This led to the fact that it was difficult to evaluate LTV (lifetime customer value) and launch targeted promotions.

The solution was to implement a mobile application for sellers, through which every request was recorded in the CRM system "here and now". Project manager of ProNovation Solutions Dautkulova Aida notes:

"The task was to eliminate the human factor when collecting customer data. The application immediately prompted the seller what data to enter, and then automatically sent them to the CRM. So the client got a complete visitor profile without manual Excel and WhatsApp."

The result is that more than 80% of customers started getting into CRM from the first contact, and the network reduced the budget for repeat marketing campaigns by almost 15% due to more accurate segmentation.

In another project, the task was to automate marketing campaigns. Previously, the employee manually checked whether the customer was eligible for the promotion and calculated the discount amount, which often led to errors and losses.

The implemented system automatically checked the customer's shopping cart and purchase history, determined whether the promotion was available, and calculated the bonus. This reduced the number of errors when issuing discounts from 7% to less than 1%.

For one lighting salon chain, the task of analyzing sales by brand and category was relevant in order to optimize inventory balances. According to Olga, an analyst at ProNovation Solutions:

"We connected a BI module that automatically built sales funnels for each brand. This is how the company discovered that some of the expensive items are idle in the warehouse, while the main flow goes to the middle segment."

This made it possible to reallocate procurement budgets and accelerate inventory turnover by 18% per quarter.

In the implementation of these projects, the following were used:

• Integration with Bitrix24 and 1C for end-to-end control of sales and customer data
• Mobile applications on Flutter to quickly scale the solution for Android and iOS
• BI-reports on Power BI, allowing managers to see analytical summaries without waiting for downloads from accounting
• Modules for automatic verification of marketing conditions based on PostgreSQL and Node.js

Such cases show that digitalization is not just a fashionable term, but a tool for solving quite tangible tasks: from reducing marketing costs to reducing staff errors and improving customer service.

For retail and distribution companies in Kazakhstan, such projects are becoming especially relevant against the background of growing competition and customer demands for quality of service.