Creating an efficient customer data structure to fuel their CRM communications and engagement platform: Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The objective was to improve the scale of personalization ability, as well as to create a smooth work environment which enables, rather than creates obstacles for the campaign managers.
- Client
- Auchan
- Capability
- Strategy & consulting · Business design & transformation · CRM & loyalty · Omnichannel journey management
- Industry
- Retail
The Challenge – Limited Data Efficiency
Being a prominent retail and ecommerce player in the Hungarian market, Auchan is generating a plethora of data points about their customers and their high-velocity transactions. With more than 25 years of experience in the domestic market and operating with over 20 stores country-wide, they have extensive knowledge in customer database management and fueling their operation with intelligence. Most of this diverse pool of data was, in fact, already integrated in their CRM engagement platform, Salesforce Marketing Cloud and was at the CRM team’s disposal, but the team had struggled making use of it in their day-to-day campaign management processes.
With a lot of siloed systems and the incremental feature developments over the years, most of this various data ended up being scattered, and stored in separate data extensions (Salesforce lingo for database-like tables). Raw transaction history records, customer profile data, shopping preferences, survey answers and calculated measures, such as RFM modeling - to name just a few, all stored separately, with the connections yet to be made into a single customer profile view. This has created a big toll on even simple actions, such as creating, filtering and querying campaign audiences, resulting in lower productivity.
Our Approach – Use-case-driven datasets
With Mito’s CRM & Loyalty team, we have been working very closely with the Auchan CRM team as long-term partners in a team augmentation setup. In this unique collaboration style, we are dedicating a group of experts to work on the day-to-day tasks with the client team, with the client’s tools and in their direct environment, so we are able to promptly help with challenging tasks, while providing on-the-job training to build strategic and tool-specific knowledge in the CRM domain. Being deeply embedded in the daily operations, we were able to gain hands-on experience about the CRM team’s way of working and their most pressing pain points.
At the same time, we have seen the great potential of the data resources, so we were determined that we should create a framework where data enables rather than hinders CRM communications. Our goal was to plan a new data model, specific to the CRM engagement platform which would act as a centralized, single customer view and can easily be used by anyone without specific technical background.
The Plan – A New Data Model
Following up on our plan, as a first step, we mapped all the available data and the as-is connections among data extensions to understand our opportunities. Building on this knowledge, we have organized a series of ideation sessions together with the Auchan team to identify new ways to enhance the CRM communication strategy.
We were able to create several new calculated measures with the different combinations of existing data points alone and new segmentation and personalization features too. Together with Auchan, we created a list of all the newly set-out use cases for each unique customer feature, which we then used as a prioritization framework on which data point to include in our “Customer 2.0” model. This was a necessary step to ensure that we do not significantly increase computing time, yet still keep all relevant information at arm’s reach.
At the same time, we were striving for automating as many database maintenance and update tasks as possible to ensure the new data model could be kept up-to-date without the campaign managers’ manual supervision.
The Result – Flexible Personalization and Efficiencies
As a result, many new features could instantly be incorporated in the campaign targeting and messaging of both ad-hoc and always-on communication. From the operation’s point of view, the Auchan team is now able to manage their CRM campaigns with greater flexibility and fortunately, they no longer need to handle complex queries and automations. This increased independence from the technical support team led to overall smoother operations, as well as more time for the team to come up with new creative ways for hyper-personalized communication.
Key learnings
🛠️ Legacy data features can become very hard to maintain over the years if not managed properly
⏳ Redundant data storage saves considerable time in the campaign managers’ work
🧑🎨 Easy-to-access data features encourage creative and innovative thinking
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