Single view of the customer

Matt Roberts, Online Marketing Controller, Argos

We are understanding in-store customers via new tactics such as e-receipts.

Our customer database is robust, we use it for email and our contact strategy, but also broadly via integration with display and search.

Nick Bonney, Head of Insight, Camelot

How do we integrate for the single customer view? We have to be realistic – there’s not much value in an in-store customer buying a lottery ticket and having a digital interaction.

We have to think of the customer need first. Sometimes there is an advantage to the customer. 

Some of our scratch cards offer a second chance to win online. This gives us more data and allows deduping offline data with our online database.

second chance scratchcard

Gareth Powell, Head of Web Analytics, JD Williams Group

Everything is rooted to our customer accounts. A customer account is stitched to 50% of our web traffic.

The challenge lies in the exponential growth of data. We capture 65 GB of data a month.

Attribution

Gareth Powell, JD Williams Group

We deploy a lot of emails and catalogues and obviously have an online presence. Understanding how this links with TV and store activity is quite complicated.

For contact optimisation, we use hold-out groups for every mailer we do.

For digital attribution, bouncing visitors get lower scores, traffic from email is downweighted (because we send so many, the channel is over credited).

We can push the bar a lot higher for paid search on smartphone; lots of users are coming back on another device within 28 days so keyword price has come down because of that.

The next stage is econometrics, we look at web traffic within six minutes of a TV ad.

Matt Roberts, Argos

We don’t enforce login so it’s difficult to tie up smartphone and laptop users. We’re only aware of email address right at the end of the customer journey [because we offer a guest checkout].

More data from stores showed that the digital journey often led nearly to reservation, then customers saw there was plenty of stock and so didn’t reserve but just headed to store.

Up until recently we weren’t aware of that. ROI at the moment would define that as no sale [for the online team]. Luckily digital is doing well enough at the moment that this doesn’t affect us too much.

argos

Teams and skills

Nick Bonney, Camelot

We need greater diversity of skills in insight teams going forward. Go back five years – the questions were all about businesses not having data.

Now we’re awash with data, so the role is more about synthesis and making sense of stuff, driving business action.

Hardcore data science skills on one hand, but also emphasis on storytelling, data visualisation, design etc.

We can’t focus on infrastructure and tech, disappear down that rabbit hole.

Beacons

Nick Bonney, Camelot

We’ve tested them and they work conceptually, but does it work for the users and at what stage in the journey do we use it? These are questions we have to work through.

Surveys

Nick Bonney, Camelot

Surveys helped build our business case for the cross-channel piece.

Social data

Gareth Powell, JD Williams Group

We take customer profiling via social media with a pinch of salt. The most popular school on Facebook is Hogwarts.

hogwarts

Nick Bonney, Camelot

We make quick reads about campaigns (social discourse analysis).

How are people talking about campaigns? Rather than linking profiles to individual data in a warehouse, we use Facebook exchange to target, but it’s more about research than a single customer view.

We have bigger fish to fry in terms of other data sources we need to integrate, rather than social data.

Data aggregation

Matt Roberts, Argos

We have enough customer behaviour signals (in the way they interact with our own website and also off-site channels) to paint enough of a picture to give strong results and conversion metrics.

Chris Popple, RBS

We need to start using data to be proactive rather than sitting in-branch and waiting for people to come in; changing from reactive to proactive.

Elliot Antrobus-Holder, Barclays

We’ve started to use external data sources to understand data that’s broader than customer base and transaction data. If we can build better profiles, we can personalise more and be proactive.

Customer experience

Chris Popple, MD Digitisation, RBS

We’re not quite sure what the banks of tomorrow will look like. Is mobile banking reason enough for customers to switch? Probably not.

mobile  banking

Elliot Antrobus-Holder, Group Digital Director, Barclays

Banking will also be relationship-led. Branches will always be needed, even if supplemented by video banking.

Legacy platforms and issues makes great customer experience difficult. At no point does all of our data join up to a single customer view. We’re taking baby steps towards that.

We need to ask ‘what do customers want?’ Then we surprise and delight and ask how can we complement the digital experience with a great branch experience.

Chris Popple, RBS

Staff should be using the same digital tools as customers and showing them how to use them.

Elliot Antrobus-Holder, Barclays

We now use video banking, that’s face to face and over the telephone, 24/7.

The business case

Chris Popple, RBS

The business case for omnichannel is more products per customer.