Delivering 360° customer insights at full throttle

Challenge

Realizing a full circle customer view

Our client, a leading importer and retailer of cars, was looking for a solution to leverage the wealth of available data on car sales and repair jobs, with one clear goal in mind: bring a more customer-centric approach in place. But while our client has collected a lot of car-centric data over the years, those data were spread out over various applications and systems.

What was lacking was a consolidated view of how end customers engage with our client’s extensive dealer network. What type of car did they buy, and how often did they come for maintenance service, for example? And how can that information be leveraged to improve operational efficiency, provide better customer service and increase revenue? Therefore, the main challenge was to deploy a solution that delivers 360° customer insights using the data already available in the existing applications and systems.

Approach

Consolidating customer data beyond systems and organizational borders

We kicked off this project with an in-depth analysis of the existing situation, mostly via data exploration and interviews. As we worked closely with both the business and the IT teams, this analysis delivered a two-fold result. On the one hand, we got a good grasp of the current data landscape and the data processing activities surrounding the available data. On the other hand, we developed a deep understanding of the business team’s requirements.

Because the new solution needed to provide a good fit with our client’s current way of working, we worked closely with the IT team to adhere to the existing BI framework and make the best use of the technologies already present. In addition, the bi-weekly alignment meetings with the business team enabled us to report transparently on project progress while acting responsively on refinement requests and changes in priority.

In the end, we delivered a solution consisting of a data mart, a series of Power BI dashboards, and several Azure data flows that consolidate available data based on our client’s business logic. To ensure end-users were well prepared to adopt this powerful suite of tools, we concluded the project with a series of hands-on workshops.

Impact

Better-targeted campaigns, deeper customer engagement

As this newly built solution provides our client’s data analysts and scientists with a reliable customer-centric data source, they can now confidently run in-depth analyses and build robust predictive models. In turn, those analyses and models deliver new 360° customer insights, empowering business end-users to define better-targeted campaigns and deepen customer engagement through more personalized communications.

Once again, the teamwork with both business and IT stakeholders proved crucial in delivering a solution that meets (or even exceeds) expectations. As a result, our client asked us to complete a follow-up project targeting an even broader usage of the solution that we built.