When Lady Gaga and 87 Leigh Smith’s appear on your customer database, you know it’s time to take action. But how?
One of our national retail clients was concerned that their multi-million dollar marketing spend wasn’t having the expected impact.
Their database was growing but their customer base appeared to be less loyal and more transactional. It was costing our client a lot of money to service these accounts, with reducing returns on their investment.
These concerns were being amplified as they were nearing the implementation of their new digital transformation plan, and wanted to ensure they could rely on their data while improving customer engagement.
Data Reliability
Do you know how reliable your customer database is?
Our client engaged Data Agility’s services to help them understand what was happening with their customers and their data. When we looked at their data in detail, we found that there were over 12 million active loyalty card members generating 100 million transactions and 300 million line items per annum. An initial analysis showed that based on this data alone, their customers shopped 8 times a year and made 25 purchases per shop.
This didn’t seem right to our client or us, and upon further analysis, we identified that 80% of their customer’s loyalty cards didn’t have an actual customer profile linked to them. We discovered that our client actually had 3.5 million customers (down from the 12 million they thought they had) who shopped on average 30 times per year and made 3 purchases per shop (instead of the 25 purchases they originally thought).
We also found that of the 3.5 million customers they actually had, a whopping 500,000 were duplicates. There were 87 accounts for Leigh Smith, a very loyal customer who was signing up for their loyalty program each time she shopped, but with multiple accounts, wasn’t receiving the full benefit of her loyalty program. With 87 accounts to her name, she was also costing our client a lot of money to service her multiple accounts.
And as expected, we found a few folk who might have been pulling our client’s leg with false names and account details. No doubt it would be great to have Lady Gaga as a customer, but we doubt she graces too many mass market Australian retailers.
Our client needed to undertake a full database review to ensure it was only populated with reliable data, and to implement new processes to radically reduce the future input and duplication errors by their customers and staff alike.
“When your data is reliable, you can have the confidence to make strategic business decisions based upon it.”
Iain Kiernan, Director Marketing and Customer Advocacy, Data Agility
Strategic Business Decisions
Creating reliable data so you can make informed business decisions.
Tidying up the data and the processes has had two major impacts for our national retail client. Firstly, it significantly improved the decision making ability of the business, because they could rely on the data and the information it provided them.
Secondly, it reduced the costs of undertaking the data analysis that underpin those business decisions. They no longer had to spend vast periods of time extracting, reporting and proving the data, but could run reports that gave them a snapshot of the business at that time and provided them with the confidence to make strategic business decisions for their future, based on that data.
And while we are delighted that our client now only has one Leigh Smith and are sad that Lady Gaga is no longer on the books, we think the ability to apply reliable data to meet their goals makes it all worthwhile.
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