Furniture is an occasional rather than an everyday purchase. So, when customers are ready to buy, retailers have a rare chance to get it right. To do this, our client, a leading multinational furniture retailer, wanted to develop a better understanding of what customers were buying, what they would be looking for next and how to better support them on their buying journey.
With the business expanding and the way people shop evolving, achieving a single view of customer data was challenging. Increasingly, customers use multiple channels to research what they want to buy and to make their purchases, and how they do this varies across markets and locations. Some go online to browse options before visiting a store. Others visit a store to see products in real life before completing their purchase online.
Web and mobile browsing, store visits, purchase transactions and loyalty schemes all generate a huge amount of data. Our client wanted to establish a global platform to turn this data into insight and stay one step ahead of customers’ evolving tastes and shopping preferences, to provide a more tailored and personalised customer experience. The result was a platform that helped the client maximise revenue and customer satisfaction by enabling the business to make smarter decisions across a wide range of marketing and commercial activity, from where to target marketing spend to how to price delivery services and where and how to develop new store formats.
We worked in partnership with the business to build a global customer insights platform that knits together data from across all channels and delivers a single customer view of online and instore activity. The product, built on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), processes transaction, loyalty, interaction, clickstream and other data sources on a weekly basis and delivers a self-service analytics capability to our client.
To turbocharge our client’s team, we brought a mix of expertise to the programme, combining data science and engineering skills, a customer/retail lens and deep experience in developing global insights platforms. Over the course of our involvement, our resources flexed to respond to the changing needs of the programme. At every stage, we formed part of a blended team. Our experts left their PwC badges at the door and worked, for all intents and purposes, as if employees of our client. Deep bonds of trust quickly developed.
We took a bold approach. Our wide experience of delivering Google Cloud programmes means we have extensive knowledge of the full range of tools and the ability to help clients get the most from the technology. For this programme, we deployed a wide range of innovative Google Cloud tools – with some so recently developed that they were still in beta phase.
A key early challenge was to create a global data foundation to underpin local use cases and deliver tailored insights for individual markets. Capitalising on AI (machine learning) techniques, our data engineers built sophisticated pipelines to ingest data from a rich mix of channels, creating a flexible solution to take account of varying and evolving data privacy regulations and considerations across global markets.
With the data foundation in place, we began work to interrogate the data, capitalising on Vertex AI, GCP’s machine learning platform. We used the solution to cluster customers according to their behaviour – for example, occasional shoppers buying children’s furniture or frequent visitors buying soft furnishings or accessories – and to identify high-value customer segments. We also built a propensity model to hone in on opportunities to turn low-value segments into high-value ones and a strategic decision app to simulate the effect of delivery pricing on value creation KPIs.
The roll-out began with pilots in France and the UK before extending to other markets. This staged approach enabled the team to adapt the solution to reflect local privacy regulations and specific requirements. Key to ensuring successful uptake was to get local business users, not just technical teams, involved from the start, ensuring the solution met their specific needs and delivered value.
As the roll-out got under way, it became clear that many markets were relying on functional data and analytics capabilities, delaying the point at which business teams could deploy the solution for impact. Here’s where we extended our data engineering support, establishing a central capability to streamline roll-out, freeing more time to tailor the solution and develop local use cases in each market.
As we got into our stride, we learned from the experience in each country to continuously improve our approach and accelerate the roll-out further. The AI-powered global insights platform is now deployed across 29 countries and covers almost 250 million customers.
“The Single Customer View product is a game changer for us, and the team has been outstanding throughout. Our teams worked together for so long due to the quality of the people that PwC could provide, and their ability to slot seamlessly into our teams. Their data specialists are also excellent communicators, which is often difficult to find.”
The platform is already helping to drive revenue. In one case, our client used the tool to identify customers interested in purchasing specific products based on their store visits and online activity. A campaign of targeted newsletters followed and was instrumental in moving these customers through the purchasing funnel, and serving more relevant and timely targeted promotions improved the customer satisfaction. The campaign, grounded in customer insights from the global platform, delivered over 150% increase in revenue from promoted products.
PwC received a global award for innovation from the client for this major programme, in recognition of the platform’s state-of-the-art design and ability to drive commercial ambitions. A mark of our success is that, after working as part of client teams, our client now has the skills and capabilities needed to maintain and develop the platform alone.
We received high praise from the client’s Head of Data & Analytics who appreciated our ‘human-led, tech-powered’ approach saying, “The Single Customer View product is a game changer for us, and the team has been outstanding throughout. Our teams worked together for so long due to the quality of the people that PwC could provide, and their ability to slot seamlessly into our teams. Their data specialists are also excellent communicators, which is often difficult to find.”
As the role and influence of cloud technologies expand, we are entering a new wave of change where cloud adoption is having a greater business impact, and transforming how people live and work.
The cloud is not a tactic; it is a strategic tool. In this article, PwC experts outline seven mission-critical factors for changing your approach.
Megan Higgins
Customer and Retail Analytics, Partner, PwC United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)7718 979448
