Harnessing data insights to boost rewards program performance

A Case Study in Loyalty Analytics Let's talk

Our client is a well-known retail business. It focuses on delivering the best in convenience, value and quality to millions of customers each week, across over 1,000 stores. In this case study we explore how Analytics8 replaced manual data analysis processes with easy-to-interpret visual dashboards, provided access to data insights to inform strategic and operational decision-making, and ultimately empowered the business to quickly respond to changes in customer behaviour.

The Challenge

Visibility of sales, operations and customer behaviour data are critical to succeeding in the highly competitive retail industry.

Retail metrics not only shed light on the overall cost of managing a business, but also provide rich insights that can be leveraged by management to improve customer satisfaction and drive profit margins.

From a data perspective, customer rewards programs are immensely powerful for helping businesses understand consumer behaviour and target their service offerings accordingly.

Our client introduced a new customer rewards program several years ago with a view to harnessing data insights to inform future strategic and operational decision-making. However, soon after deployment, program analysts found that they lacked the sufficient analytical capabilities to interrogate data from the rewards program

In a complex data environment, with substantial data volumes representing millions of customer transactions and significant manual effort required to extract and analyse data, the program team faced many challenges delivering up-to-date sales and customer behaviour reports. With low visibility of key program and marketing campaign metrics, management could not respond to customer behaviour trends in a timely manner. In addition, they could not modify their strategies to drive customer satisfaction and store performance.

Our client needed robust data-driven insight into the behaviours of its reward program members. With existing business intelligence tools failing to deliver the quality and depth of insight needed, the organisation had to move quickly to roll out an alternative solution.

The Solution

The retailer worked with us to transform the data environment associated with their reward program. We built an intuitive and user-friendly cloud-based analytical solution that not only showcased key metrics and performance against KPIs for the rewards program, but which also enabled program analysts and management to drill down into the underlying data.

The solution was purpose-built using Amazon Web Services (AWS Cloud), with Amazon Redshift as the database and Microstrategy as the accompanying data visualisation tool. Data is pulled from the enterprise data warehouse and connects to key data sources (including SAP). Amazon Redshift extracts relevant data in tables to populate dashboards. This integrated solution draws on data from across the business, allowing analysts to review key metrics and performance against KPIs on a weekly basis.

We deployed a highly skilled team of SQL developers to drive implementation. Critically for a business of our client’s size and scale, we built scripts to auto-manipulate and transform data for the dashboards. This ensured that rewards program data remained both accessible and useable for other business teams.

The Analytics8 platform has been a game-changer. The dashboards are great for quickly zeroing in on our most important metrics… and the ability to filter by segment and store means helps us understand what’s driving performance on those metrics.

Rewards program analyst

The project was delivered in three phases:

  • Trading Dashboard

The Trading Dashboard summarises the overall performance of the rewards program. Designed for executives, it provides visibility of the most strategically important (and primarily customer-focused) metrics, including scan rate, tag rate, basket size level, active members, sales comparisons and customer sales segmentations.

  • Campaign Dashboard

The Campaign Dashboard tracks campaign performance over time. It captures performance against KPIs, campaign results and forecasting, customer segmentation results and financials (including return on investment).

  • Marketing Segmentation tool

The Marketing Segmentation Tool assists the marketing team with customer segmentation and analysis. In particular, it identifies groups of high-value customers to target in future campaigns.

The developers at Analytics8 were highly skilled, experienced and technically proficient. We felt like we were in safe hands throughout the technical deployment

Rewards program analyst

 

Results

The dashboards we created have transformed the business intelligence, analytics and big data capabilities for our client’s rewards team. For the first time since launching the rewards program, analysts and management have visibility of all key program and campaign metrics in a simple, concise and easy-to-use format.

Key benefits:

Reliability and accuracy: The solution has removed the need for program analysts to manually extract and analyse data. With new automation and data visualisation capabilities, the rewards team can be confident that the data is both reliable and accurate.

Rich data insights: The dashboards emphasise key metrics for immediate visibility, but additionally allow analysts to interrogate the granular underlying data. This has enabled our client to better understand performance drivers on key metrics and to identify patterns by store, customer segment and more.

Improved responsiveness: Our solution is fast and up-to-date. It provides weekly updates about store and segment performance. This has enabled the rewards team to respond quickly to customer behaviour, rapidly modifying strategies or launching campaigns to address underperforming segments.

Staff engagement and buy-in: Our client’s analysts and management have embraced the new easy-to-use dashboards. The CEO has requested a custom mobile application to monitor segment performance on the go.

Let’s Talk.

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