Luxury Goods

Delivering rich customer insight at pace

Challenge

The client, an extremely well-regarded UK luxury goods business with a strong heritage and global customer base, recognised their low customer data and insight maturity as both a risk and an opportunity. CVM People were contacted to come in and help the customer and technical leadership to shape a vision encompassing the capture, transformation, analysis, and surfacing of customer insight to support strategy and decision-making across sales, service, and marketing.
In this particular client, the will to change existed and there was conceptual alignment at a senior level between the commercial and technology teams, but much to do in terms of the mechanics, processes, operating model, and operational expectations across functions to ensure that ambition was successfully realised.
Ultimately, the goal was to create a rich source of customer insight, surfaced in different guises through different tools (included a dedicated user-facing insight tool) to suit the needs of the various stakeholders, using the client’s own internal people wherever possible to ensure a high level of technical and business solution ownership and understanding, and have it live for use within 6 months.
The insight needed to be sufficient to inform immediate and future activities, including:
  • Customer commercial strategy – acquisition/up & x-sell/retention.
  • Campaign & journey planning and targeting.
  • Sales and account management targeting and prioritisation.
  • Service level differentiation & personalisation.
  • Customer performance reporting at exec and function levels.
  • Digital offer management.

Solution

Deploying a team of three to provide customer management, analytics, and data expertise, delivery was split into a number of short phases:
1. Metrics and strategy segments | Define & Design
We assembled stakeholder champions from across Sales, Service, Marketing, and Data – with each champion selected based on a mixture of depth of business and customer knowledge, data literacy, and ability to influence their peers. This group was then responsible for completing a series of workshops, interviews, and deep dive sessions, with CVM People guiding and challenging to:
  • Get us rapidly up to speed on the overall product, service, and customer mechanics of the organisation – avoiding a long, drawn-out discovery period.
  • Develop a shopping list of metrics and measures for each of their business areas, prioritised with a MoSCoW framework
  • Shape and agree data definitions for each metric, identifying gaps and inadequacies with v1 definitions to prioritise supporting data collection and development.
  • align definitions across teams, and with Finance, to ensure a single consistent version of each metric across the organisation.
  • inform, shape and agree the dimensions and parameters for the first iteration of strategy segments (current value x potential value x engagement score).
  • inform and prioritise customer profiling requirements based on potential business impact.
2. Customer analytic record | Design & Build
To accommodate the requirements outlined in the initial phase, help the client balance ongoing pressures across business-as-usual data engineering, ensure a high pace of delivery, we designed the data layer as a standalone instance, based on the organisation’s design principles, within their cloud environment.
The Customer Analytic Record (CAR) housed over 1200 data points attached to each customer record, covering:
  • Simple calculations such as total spend, spend by category, etc.
  • More complex calculations such as potential value
  • Lifecycle markers
  • Behavioural data
  • Interests and motivations
  • NPS and channel level CSAT
  • Demographic profiling
  • 3rd party enrichment (MOSAIC)
Aggregate source data was delivered into the SQL layer via the main warehouse, with derivations, scoring, and calculations managed within an analytical layer deployed specifically for this project. Experian’s MOSAIC data set was used to enrich the existing customer data, providing additional layers to the customer profiling.
3. Customer Profiler | Build & Deploy
The insights generated within the CAR were surfaced both by a dedicated, bespoke Customer Profiler tool for discovery, planning, and strategy activity and directly into the Sales and Service CRM to support audience selections, service prioritisation, and sales targeting.
All design decisions were made to prioritise speed, stability, and ultimately ease of use/adoption across the target stakeholder groups. Excel was chosen as the front end due to its broad usage and availability, as well as its flexibility in certain areas compared to standard BI tools.
The Customer Profiler allowed our target users to analyse a wide range of pre-defined customer cohorts (segments, sub-segments, portfolios, etc.) both individually and against each other, across time periods. The tool serves up a wealth of insight across:
  • Sales and Financial (total sales / by period / channel / category / debt / bad debt / etc.)
  • Product (purchases / volume / frequency / category / etc.)
  • Engagement (satisfaction / activities / channels / topics / etc.)
  • Preferences (topics / channels / departments / contactability /etc.)
  • Lifecycle stage (new / lapsing/etc.)
  • Demographics (wealth / location / Mosaic segment / etc.)
  • Motivations & interests (product type / price point / why buy? / etc.)
Built into views ranging from simple summaries, to comprehensive deep dives, to multi-cohort comparisons.
4. Refine and Hand-over | Train & Adopt
Once complete, we took the stakeholder champions through a period of feedback and refinement to sharpen up the presentation, insight clarity, and supporting documentation. During this time we trained-up internal data engineering and analysis resource in preparation for the handover of the CAR and its regular operations.
Once the champions were happy with the presentation and clarity of the insight outputs from the profiler (and those surfaced directly to the CRM), we finalised documentation and handed over the operation to the internal teams, providing as-needed support to the technical teams through two update cycles to ensure confidence, and to the stakeholder champions to help them drive adoption across the target business areas.

Results

The outputs of this project provided the client with their first clear,. comprehensive view of their organisation through a customer lens. fully managed by their own internal resource within 2 months of launch, it provides the customer, commercial, and exec teams with a rich view of their customer base, allowing for better decision-making and planning.
Positive impacts range from increased volume and value of sales within account managed portfolios due to improved offer targets, to Customer Services having far ore information immediately available to support and serve customers in a more efficient manner.
One of the final pieces delivered was an executive dashboard extension of the Profiling tool, giving the leadership a view of company performance – spend, acquisition, churn, debt, etc. in period to help the sponsor embed a customer centric view from the top down.
We continue to support the client with customer and insight initiatives, developing on the data driven foundation this project helped to establish.
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