Our client is a leading global fast food company that owns several popular chain stores. With fierce competition worldwide, attracting and retaining customers is essential. The organisation has established a clear objective of encouraging its customers to make ‘one more visit.’ To achieve this objective, our client is developing innovative and targeted marketing campaigns (with a strong digital focus to collect data points) to succeed in identifying, servicing and retaining its customer base. 

The Challenge

In the fast food industry, a company’s competitive advantage is dependent on timely and accurate data that sheds light on both operations and sales. Accordingly, our client relies on data insights for everything from tracking transactions to measuring franchise operations and assessing performance against KPIs set by head office.

While the orgaisation had plenty of sales and operational data, it lacked information about its customers. Their recently launched mobile app gathered some customer information, but without a CRM or integration with other core business systems, the data collected from the app lacked meaning. Failure of data availability and integration were negatively impacting the business – and its bottom line.

Our client needed a way to realise value from mobile app data, better understand its customer base, manage multiple data sources and business systems, and deliver personalised content to its customers that would encourage ‘one more visit.’ The solution needed to overcome the limitations of previously attempted CRM implementations, and to provide the following capabilities:

• Enable integration between the CRM system and the mobile app
• Use Bluetooth beacons to identify when app users are within range
• Deliver mobile push notifications based on user location
• Enable consumer segmentation through near real-time insights to gain a better understanding of the end customer
• Support real-time data flow and interaction between the CRM, the app and core business systems along the customer journey (e.g. from downloading the app to placing an order, entering a store and purchasing a meal – potentially with a personalised discount voucher)

The Solution

Having successfully worked together in the past, we were engaged Analytics8 to provide data integration services to support the implementation of a new CRM platform (AppBoy). Our involvement focused on two areas:

• Integrating new datasets from mostly cloud-based systems into the enterprise data warehouse
• Advising our client in terms of better use of cloud-based services for the management of its data platform

We took a structured and strategy-led approach to the data integration effort. Working alongside multiple service providers and adhering to industry best practices, our Microsoft and data integration teams worked collaboratively to gain a holistic understanding of the current state of our client’s data, as well as a coherent view of changes that would be needed to support new technology implementation. For example, how would the CRM change the organisation’s understanding of its customer data? Would existing data need to be remodeled to account for new information in a CRM world? And, what would be the best approach to integrating data across business systems?

We defined the detailed scenarios, modelling information flow through the business. Agile delivery methods were essential for quickly delivering several working prototypes and functional productionised systems.

In parallel, we developed custom solutions to improve the functionality of new technologies. For example, we developed a custom SSIS solution to support communication with the Bluetooth beacon and the app. We created intelligent data matching and cleansing processes to minimise issues with data duplication, and in doing so, improve data integrity.

Results

Our client is already realising benefits from our data integration solution, which is partially live. The organisation is drawing on the improvements to send personalised emails to customers via its CRM, and has plans to launch personalised content via the mobile app in coming months. Ultimately, our client will be able to push notifications to customers’ phones when they approach a restaurant.

To date, the data integration has achieved strong results:

• Analytics8 has pushed half a million prospects to the organisation’s CRM platform
• The CRM has successfully captured information that was previously challenging to collect or analyse, including ad hoc data requests
• Accurate and reliable data cleansing can now be completed (e.g. first purchase, most recent purchase) to improve information quality in relation to the organisations marketing activities

When the data and technology improvements are fully implemented, it is expected that our client will have:

• Full visibility of customer activity across the full lifecycle
• A richer understanding of customer preferences and behaviours
• A consolidated view of customers that can be reconciled across core business systems

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