Retailer
Single Customer View & Customer Data Warehouse Rescue
Challenge
The Data & Insight Director of a well-known premium retail group requested CVM People come in an undertake a quality and cost assessment of an ongoing Data Warehouse and Single Customer View project being delivered by a big 4 consultancy. The client was concerned about high burn rate and slow progress leading to significant overspend and delivery delays.
Over an initial 6 week project review became clear that the project had some major challenges and had already been through the hands of another global IT house in an earlier failed attempt. Primarily the issues fell into the following categories:
- Poor processes and working practices between the client and its chosen partner
- A lack of alignment and clarification of ownership / RACI hampering problem solving and decision-making
- The wrong people in the wrong roles across the project
- A delivery model which weighted heavily toward management and senior consultants with far too little technical development and design resource.
Identified by the business as a key enabler of their new offer management and personalisation efforts across their brands, significant delays – or total failure – to deliver would result in a cascading effect on the midterm ambitions of the business.
Solution
After the initial review, it was agreed that delivery of the project in its current guise was simply unrealistic. The mutual decision was made for the incumbent to wind down and hand over to a new team.
The client asked us to stay on and assume responsibility for the delivery of the project – providing project management, design, and engineering services. Our delivery model, focusing on a smaller number of very high skill, high experience resources into key roles with all extraneous, junior, and non-delivery critical resources removed from the team allowed for a significant ramp up in design and build capacity.
On the client side, we realigned the internal resources engaged on the project, ways of working, and requirement/feedback loops to improve clarity and pace, giving the client a better sense of control and ensuring information was disseminated quickly, allowing for blockers to be cleared and decisions made at the appropriate levels.
The single customer view itself provided a unified view of customers across 3 brands and a range of retail and financial services product holdings. Creating a complete, group level understanding of customer for the first time the organisation’s history. Drawing from 100+ source systems, the SCV informed analytic views for Campaign Decisioning, Machine Learning, Customer Insight, BI, Trading, and Commercial Planning.
One of the key purposes of the warehouse was the facilitation of centralised customer base management, driving cross sell / upsell, loyalty, and proactive retention through a unified commercial plan, whilst also supporting the CRM activities of the individual brands. This required the management of a large number of predictive ML models supporting CLV, churn, and propensities for a range of long and short term campaign objectives. To facilitate this, a modelling automation layer was also added.
Finally, we put in place a new operating model and recruited the correct permanent resource to ensure internal ownership of all processes, tools, and platforms for the final product, ensuring a low TCO and maximum control for the client.
Results
- The warehouse and single customer view were successfully completed within 15 months.
- In the final phase of this period, we introduced the permanent resource into the new operating model, trolling our resources off as handover were complete to ensure a smooth transition and high degree of knowledge transfer.
- Two of our experts remained with the team for the next 6 months to ensure bedding in and ongoing development of the overall data warehouse happened in line with expectation.
- Overall, the solution dramatically improved data variety, velocity, and quality for insight, campaign decisioning, and commercial planning. Off the back of this success, a long term client relationship was formed, which has seen us engage on a range of diverse projects from commercial strategy to team design and build across the organisation.
