Customer data is the key ingredient for this leading global fast food company. With fierce competition, attracting and retaining customers is essential for the survival of their chain stores. The organisation focuses on 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

Our client relies on data for everything from tracking transactions to measuring franchise operations and assessing performance against KPIs. While the organisation had ample sales and operational data, it severely lacked information about its customers.

The organisation had previously and unsuccessfully attempted to implement a CRM solution to gain a single view of customer data. It had launched a mobile app to gather some customer information, but without a CRM or integrations with other core business systems, the data collected from the app lacked meaning.

Our client needed a way to realise value from its mobile app data, better understand its customer base, manage multiple data sources and business systems, and deliver personalised content to its customers to encourage repeat visits.

The solution needed 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 mobile 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 to provide data integration services to support the implementation of a new CRM and marketing platform (AppBoy).

Analytics8 involvement focused on two areas:  

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

With deep expertise in business intelligence, data warehousing and integration and cloud-based solutions, our team was well placed to navigate the organisation’s technology architecture. Their AppBoy cloud marketing platform, for example, required a non-standard integration with both the classic Microsoft stack data warehouses and Microsoft reporting solutions.

While some datasets already existed in the enterprise data warehouse, the use of AppBoy’s data would allow for further enrichment of customer datasets, leading to improved customer understanding. The main technical challenge was building the data integration processes between two disparate systems. With this in mind, our scope for data enrichment was soon expanded to include near-real-time integration between AppBoy (the marketing platform), the data warehouse, and Bluetooth beacons.

AppBoy was supported by the classic Microsoft stack for the data warehouse (with SQL Server 2014 for the database), SQL Server Integration Services for data integration and delivery, MicroStrategy for reporting and Amazon RDS to store sales data at the lowest level of granularity (i.e. sales docket items).

We took a structured and strategy-led approach to the data integration effort. Working alongside multiple service providers and adhering to best practice, our Microsoft and Data Integration teams worked collaboratively to gain a holistic understanding of the current state of data, as well as a coherent view of changes that would be needed to support new technology implementation.

The team was able to define – and answer – key strategic questions relating to data management. For example, how would the CRM change our client’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?

Next, our team defined detailed scenarios modelling information flow through the business. In parallel, we developed custom SSIS solutions to enable functionality of new technologies, including communication with the Bluetooth beacon and the mobile app.

We are experts in iterative yet rapid delivery of tailored solutions. On this engagement, our team’s deep familiarity and expertise with Agile and Scrum delivery methods enabled us to succeed in quickly delivering several working prototypes and functional productionised systems.

Results

Our client is already realising benefits from Analytics8’s data integration solution, which is partially live. It 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 the coming months. Ultimately, the organisation will be able to push notifications to customers’ phones when they approach one of their restaurants.  

The data integration has achieved strong results to date:

• We have pushed half a million prospects to our client’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 customers’ activities.

When our client’s data and technology improvements are fully implemented, it is expected that they will have full visibility of customer activity across the full lifecycle, a richer understanding of customer preferences and behaviours, and a consolidated view of customers that can be reconciled across core business systems.

Microsoft Azure has been identified as a key component of the final solution, given the need to ensure all data systems are reliable and scalable. It is currently being used as a data repository, with plans to build on it in the future.

Our focus now is on developing improvements to the organisation’s online ordering system, guest experience surveys and wi-fi interactions, and using those data points to create a central database of customer information.

Future plans will also focus on improving integration across core business systems and enabling real-time interaction, as well as moving code data processing workloads into Microsoft Azure.

Analytics8 is a technology agnostic advisor and implementation partner, not a software reseller. We pride ourselves on being able to provide businesses with genuine, unbiased advice based on our deep experience in data warehousing, business intelligence and advanced analytics. Our team is passionate about transforming data into usable information and actionable insight and has the skills and experience to deliver projects irrespective of an organisation’s current technology mix.

Let’s Talk.

It would be great to hear from you.

Address: Warnford Court, 29 Throgmorton St, London EC2N 2AT

Phone: +44 (0)203 6173 723

Email: [email protected]