Customer Relationship Management & Loyalty
A global retailer needed help establishing a single view of the customer across multiple systems to take their personalization goals to the next level.
The Problem
A global retailer with multiple channels recognized the need to better understand cross-channel customer behaviors to more effectively market to customer segments that were underutilizing brand offerings. Industry trends have shown that customers taking advantage of more channels engage and spend more with the brand. The retailer had made multiple attempts at consolidating the various customer repositories into a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system in the past but still had several challenges they needed to overcome.
- Multiple Master Systems - Customer data was collected in multiple systems driving the various channels. Each repository acted as a "master record" for the customer data for its own purpose and did not always map or align easily with other repositories to allow for a single view of the customer to exist in one location.
- Continued New System Introductions - Each time the retailer pursued a new channel addition, they were forced to introduce new repositories since a single master repository was not yet implemented. But, with each new system introduction, solving the single repository challenges became even more difficult.
- Lack of Centralized Analytics - Most reporting and visibility into each channel utilized custom reporting or data limited to a single channel or system. Without global insights aggregated across the entire business, it was difficult to analyze or prioritize growth opportunities objectively.
The retailer knew that before adding additional programs, such as social media and digital loyalty, they needed to resolve differences between customer systems and adopt a CRM solution that would allow for complete and unified view of their customers. The goal was to consolidate customer data into a single system that could support data synchronization across all existing channels and easily allow for the integration of new channels. Also, with a centralized data set established, the retailer wanted to immediately follow the effort with better business intelligence and visibility on customer segments to improve the prioritization of future personalization strategies and feature additions.
The Solution
We began with an Understand phase, a process where we learned from subject matter experts, hosted user focus groups, and worked with the various customer systems to learn the process and fully understand of our users’ pain points. With as many false starts as had been attempted in the past, there was a significant amount of material that allowed us to quickly focus on the leading options to approach a solution. The Understand phase resulted in a plan for selecting from a few leading vendor solutions capable of addressing the retailer’s goals and helping them overcome the primary challenges.
The project team quickly narrowed down the vendor selection and established a phased approach project plan that would allow us to onboard the new CRM solution and integrate it with every system that housed customer data across the enterprise. Our team conducted a full gap analysis to ensure customer data was able to sync across the enterprise in a manner that would allow customer journeys through every channel to either continue operating or adjust as needed for a more personalized experience.
Systems integrated across the enterprise included:
- Brick and Mortar Point of Sale & Clienteling
- eCommerce
- Customer Mobile App
- Customer Order Management
- Marketing Campaign Management
- Business Intelligence and Analytics
The Result
As a result of this initiative, the retailer has experienced the following results:
- Aggregated Analytics - Awareness of customer behavior is pivotal in creating digital transformation strategies. With more centralized analytics, we were able to prioritize and target the most impactful features over the never-ending list of feature requests leveraging a holistic, data-driven approach.
- Increased Omnichannel Customer Counts – Insights gathered by the new CRM dramatically increased the retailer’s understanding of the value of each tier of customers across multiple channels. Within the first year of implementation, the retailer was able to target efforts and entice customers to take advantage of different channel offerings resulting conversion rates 3-4 times higher than prior levels. Additionally, the number of unique higher-value omnichannel customers increased by over 25% over prior years as a result of introducing more customers to new offerings.
- Reduced Duplicate Profiles – Once all customer data sets were unified, the retailer was easily able to identify and merge hundreds of thousands of incomplete or duplicate profiles that existed across previously dispersed systems. This new visibility allowed for proper marketing segmentation and campaign management strategies that increase personalized experiences across all channels.
Ultimately, the introduction of a CRM system to the organization allowed an enterprise to transform to a customer-centric system that better reflect the goals of the entire organization.
