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:
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Simple calculations such as total spend, spend by category, etc.
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More complex calculations such as potential value
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Lifecycle markers
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Behavioural data
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Interests and motivations
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NPS and channel level CSAT
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Demographic profiling
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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:
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Sales and Financial (total sales / by period / channel / category / debt / bad debt / etc.)
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Product (purchases / volume / frequency / category / etc.)
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Engagement (satisfaction / activities / channels / topics / etc.)
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Preferences (topics /Â channels / departments / contactability /etc.)
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Lifecycle stage (new / lapsing/etc.)
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Demographics (wealth / location / Mosaic segment / etc.)
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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.