A global retailer needed help establishing a single view of the customer across multiple systems to take their personalization goals to the next level.
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.
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.
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:
As a result of this initiative, the retailer has experienced the following results:
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.
