Problem

A global retailer with multiple channels recognized the need to better understand cross-channel customer behaviors in order to market to customer segments that underutilize some of the brand offerings.  Industry trends have shown that customers taking advantage of more channels engage and spend more with the brand.  The retailer had made several attempts at consolidating the various customer repositories into a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system in the past, but 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 it's own purpose and did not always map or align easily with other repositories to create a single view of the customer in one location.
• Continued New System Introductions - Each time the retailer pursued a new channel addition that would collect customer data or manage accounts, new repositories were introduced since the business couldn't wait indefinitely for a single master repository.  With each new system introduction, the complexity to solve 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 that were aggregated across the entire business, it was difficult to analyze or prioritize where the largest opportunities were across the brand…including the justification for a central CRM repository and transformation of the system infrastructures to be a customer-centric enterprise.

The retailer knew that before adding more programs, such as social media and digital loyalty, they needed to resolve differences between customer systems and adopt a CRM solution that would serve as a single point of view of their customers. The goal was to consolidate customer data into one single system that could support data synchronization across all existing channels and systems as well as easily allow for new channels to be introduced.  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 prioritization of future personalization strategies and feature additions.

Solution

Single view of customer, aggregated transactions across channels, analytics feeds, marketing segmentation and actions.

We began with an Understand phase, a process where we learned from subject matter experts, hosted user focus groups and actually worked with the various customer systems to learn the process and gain a deep understanding of our users’ pain points. With as many false starts as had been attempted in the past, there was actually a lot of material that helped us quickly focus on leading options to approach a solution. The Understand phase resulted in a plan for selecting from a few leading vendor solutions that would address the goals and overcome the primary challenges.

The project team was quickly able to narrow down the vendor selection and establish a phased approach project plan that would allow us to onboard the new CRM solution and integrate with every system with customer data across the enterprise. A full gap analysis was completed 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

Result

As a result of this initiative, the retailer has experienced the following:

• 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 with data-driven approaches rather than relying solely on intuition.
• Increased Omnichannel Customer Counts - within the first year after the new CRM was in place and better understanding the value of each tier of customers across multiple channels, the retailer was able to target efforts and entice customers to take advantage of different channel offerings has made some segments convert at 3-4 times prior levels.  The number of unique higher-value omnichannel customers has also increased over 25% over prior years as a result of introducing more customers to new offerings.
• Reduced Duplicate Profiles - an after-effect of unifying all customer data sets resulted in identifying hundreds of thousands of profiles that were considered single-purchase customers on one channel unknowingly engaging with the brand through other emails, family members, or even different channels.  This new visibility allowed for proper marketing segmentation and campaign management strategies to reprioritize efforts to increase personalized experiences across all channels.

Ultimately, the introduction of a CRM system to the organization has truly allowed an enterprise to transform to a customer-centric system to reflect the goals of the entire organization.

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