Situation
Our Client, an international conglomerate offering a broad range of luxury goods and services, was willing to bring his customer knowledge management to the next level.
More precisely, our Client was facing the challenge of gathering and consolidating customer data from the various customer touchpoints it provides. The target was to leverage online technologies in order to assemble data from its different activities. The objectives were to:
- Enrich and broaden customer base of each activity
- Identify up-sell and cross-sell opportunities
- Increase overall customer loyalty, by creating a virtual “Club” offering exclusive products and services
OWT's role was to help the Client in this digital transformation project by:
Identifying valuable customer data to share and leveraging digital tools
Defining a vision for customer data usage and align stakeholders' interests
Determining technical options to translate the vision
We selected 4 companies within the Client's organization to lead a proof of concept in 4 representative activities of the conglomerate: Hospitality, Winery, Better-aging, and Healthcare.
Approach
Our team at OWT conducted this project in a three-fold approach:
1. Analyse customer data collection processes
During this phase, we interviewed client-facing services and IT teams to understand which customer data was currently being collected as well as how and where they are stored in each entity. This mapping revealed a huge opportunity, as well as a challenge to tackle: for the 4 selected companies, we identified more than 14 different data collection processes and 17 different IT systems storing customer data. Besides, some customer data were incomplete, lacked granularity, or were not usable because it was stored offline in notebooks, post-its or paper sheets.
OWT recommended to use 5 main data sources to work on, and defined a unique framework to classify customer data across the pilot entities.
2. Define a vision and identify roadblocks
By interviewing Marketing, Communication and Management teams, OWT clarified current status of knowledge management activities, and associated pain points in each company. We then conducted a workshop with top management teams to define a common vision for the usage of customer data.
During this phase, we also highlighted the main obstacles that we needed to overcome in order to ensure project's success:
Data privacy, as we talk about customer data collected by various activities – including Healthcare and various geographies. This issue has been addressed by a specialized law firm within the project.
Governance, given that customer data was historically being managed by each company independently. This topic will be handled by each company and supervised at a group level.
Scalability, even if the proof of concept was led for 4 companies, the vision is to integrate and share customer data from all 10 companies of the conglomerate. This point will be taken into consideration in the next phase of the project.
3. Propose and design technical options
During last phase of the project, we explored digital solutions to translate the vision into reality. We documented and presented technical options to the Group's shareholders, including estimated costs, time-to-market and pros and cons of each solution. The selected options combined the best of market and custom solutions, using cloud infrastructure and custom web applications suited best to the Clients' needs.
This first phase confirmed the value of this global initiative:
Our Client will have a consolidated view of its customer data. This would not have been possible without the help of digital technologies.
Our Client will more easily identify commercial opportunities thanks to an improved customer knowledge.
Our Client realized the need to modernize and optimize its customer data collection processes to improve data quality and increase service level.
OWT provided a clear action plan to conduct the project's next step: The Blueprint phase. This second phase aims to prepare the implementation and launch of the outpointed solutions. The Client has decided to start this phase for one of their key activities: Hospitality.
