Every merchant question, answered against live data
A specialty sports retailer plugged Solya into Slack so the team could ask anything — and get back a sourced answer, not another report request.
Outcome
< 90s avg. response
Network
12 stores · multi-brand
The challenge
Operations, marketing and store leads were filing dozens of ad-hoc data requests every week. The analytics team became a bottleneck: simple questions ("how did this SKU perform last weekend?") were taking days to answer.
What we changed
Solya was connected to the data warehouse, POS feed and the team's existing semantic layer. A Slack app let anyone ask a question in natural language and get an answer back with the underlying query, the rows it pulled, and a confidence note.
How decisions get made
Each question is parsed against the semantic layer first — definitions of margin, sell-through, units, returns are pinned so two people asking the same question get the same answer. Anything ambiguous gets a clarifying question instead of a wrong number.
Where it lands
Answers stay inside Slack threads with the source query attached, so anyone can audit them later. The analytics team's queue dropped from dozens to a handful — and those that remain are real strategic questions, not lookups.
What changed
- Average question-to-answer time under 90 seconds
- Analytics team requests reduced by ~80%
- Every answer is reproducible — same definition, same query, same numbers