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customer data

Majority of customer data resides with IT teams

960 640 Stuart O'Brien

Seventy-eight percent of organisations report centralising customer data management within information technology (IT) teams, with a survey of 405 marketing leaders conducted in May and June 2023 finding 59% of them agreed with the statement that “our IT policies and/or strategy constrains our use of emerging technologies.”

That’s from a new Gartner report, which asserts that collaboration between IT and marketing has traditionally been focused on selecting applications with their own data stores, such as a marketing automation solution which stored contacts, leads, and content.

Benjamin Bloom, VP Analyst in the Gartner Marketing practice, said: “Diversification of the usage of customer data, beyond marketing, forces marketers to re-evaluate how their applications interact with enterprise-wide data. Successful CMOs should seize the opportunity to re-focus and leverage a new class of cloud-based IT resources, unless they fall short of marketing’s needs.”

Marketing’s autonomy over their own technology choices is also shifting based on the vital role that data and cohesive workflows play in productivity: 78% of respondents said they must select their solutions from pre-approved vendors and platforms.

The survey also found that across key martech activities, IT is on average taking greater ownership, and the frequency of marketing teams with sole ownership is receding. This shift spans both business-centric work such as acquisition of budget for martech, and driving adoption and utilization to support customer journeys, to more technical work such as configuration and deployment of new martech, and managing vendor relationships and contracts; management of all of these shifted toward IT year-over-year.

Overall, while martech teams were open to letting marketing and IT play to each others’ relative strengths, the share of respondents stating IT had sole responsibility or was leading with marketing in support increased across every activity for which there was year-over-year data between 2022 and 2023.

“In a perfect world, marketers lead more business-focused work, and IT leads more technical and integration activities. The focus should be on getting the work done, not a territorial battle,” said Bloom. “Many marketers will welcome this shift given the dependence of many technical activities on underlying data warehouse infrastructure owned by IT, but just as encouraging is the increasing business-savvy from IT teams which can drive the ultimate goal of productive martech stacks.”

How Pentland Brands is using data to get closer to its customers

960 640 Stuart O'Brien

Pentland Brands is the name behind some of the world’s best sports, outdoor and lifestyle brands. It owns Speedo, Berghaus, Canterbury of New Zealand, Endura, ellesse and Mitre. It’s also the UK footwear and apparel licensee for Kickers. Pentland Brands products are available in over 190 countries and are sold either directly by Group companies or are represented by licensees and distributors.

The Challenge

Driven by the needs of their IT, Analytics and Marketing departments, Pentland Brands wanted to get closer to their customers. Working with many distributors made it difficult to understand how their brands were performing across different demographics and geographies. With different data sets coming from each distributor, it was difficult to see how campaigns were impacting performance across the business.

Pentland Brands needed a single and consistent view of each end customerregardless of the distributor a product was being sold through. The necessary data sources spanned internal systems like SAP, on-premises databases and CSV files to distributor systems where Pentland Brands could not define the data received. With the number of data sources growing regularly, Pentland Brands needed a solution that allowed for the onboarding of new data sources in an efficient and consistent manner.

The Solution

As the market leader for data and analytics, Google Cloud was the natural choice for Pentland Brands, offering services and capabilities designed for ‘Google scale’ data, and aligning with their future ML/AI ambitions. CTS was chosen to deliver this project due to their experience in helping customers adopt Google’s culture of innovation, alongside proven data migration and analytics expertise. CTS also demonstrated their ability to deliver complex and unique solutions tailored for Pentland Brands.

In order to create a single source of truth for Pentland Brands’ data, CTS designed and built a unified data and analytics platform using Google Cloud, with the goal of putting actionable insights into the hands of their teams, globally.

Like all “greenfield” environments, CTS began the project with the creation of a Landing Zone, i.e. the initial environment to build on top of – using Google best practices and standards for adoption, governance & security. The Landing Zone approach avoids common security and cost pitfalls, while accelerating consistent adoption, since all teams can start from the same base.

With a solid foundation in place, CTS began creating the unified data and analytics platform. Anchored around BigQuery (for its high scalability and price:performance ratio) CTS were able to pull all the disparate information sources into GCP in raw form, allowing for re-processing of data as required in the future. The raw data was then processed and merged into a new data model to provide the same view of each end customer, regardless of where the customer purchased from. By doing so, all data is secure, reliably stored and available for analytical use across the Pentland Brands business via the simple BigQuery interface or the Business Intelligence tools already in use at Pentland Brands.

The Results

Time to Insight

Pentland Brands spent a lot of time being ‘data busy’ in the past through manually collating, shaping and combining a subset of their data. CTS has given them the ability to do this consistently across distributors, allowing them to get a better understanding of the end customer.

The time saved on ingesting and transforming data has allowed the Pentland Brands analytics teams to spend more time on analysis, which is where the true business value can be realised. CTS has helped to reduce their time to insights from almost infinite to 2 weeks. Knowing the underlying data is no longer subject to human error has instilled a new level of trust for all reporting and visualisations. Informed decisions can now be made quickly using real time insights.

Data Completeness

For Pentland Brands, the ability to access insights was a challenge. Analysts could only look at each individual distributor in isolation because, with no aggregation, combining data was such a manual task. CTS has helped to onboard eight of Pentland Brands largest, most valuable distributors to the platform already. From here, they can now enjoy unified analytics across their many distributors, without analysis having to be done on a case by case basis.

What’s more, now that Pentland Brands has access to automated data ingestion and interactive dashboards, reporting has moved from quarterly to monthly – delivering strategic business insights 3x faster than before.

Democratisation and Governance

All data presented to end users is now consistently structured, named and formatted, making it significantly easier to onboard new teams and data. To make sure the data platform is set up for success, Pentland Brands has set up a Cloud Centre of Excellence for future governance and control of the platform. Teams are empowered with a deeper understanding of their customers, and brands, which has a positive impact across the business on key functions such as supply chain, marketing, advertising and demand projection.

Improved Reporting 

Pentland Brands previously had no holistic view of product insights but can now view metrics such as sell through rates, assessing sales performance of products so they can re-order back stock and sell more where needed. This helps to get ahead of the competition as well as cut loss and wastage. More granular insights help contextualise data.

An improvement in data quality has further led to almost 100% eradication of errors across reporting. By having a master data point of view, CTS has helped to consolidate disparate data sources and align data back to their finance systems.

Pentland Brands is looking forward to seeing the use of data evolve to drive continued success and satisfaction for their clients around the world.

In data we trust: Building customer confidence in a digital economy

960 640 Guest Post

By Richard Menear, CEO, Burning Tree

In the modern, digital world, online shopping is becoming the norm within the retail market. Accelerated by the pandemic, the UK’s proportion of online retail sales soared to the highest on record, reaching 35.2% in January 2021. And with digitisation continuing to evolve the online shopping experience, it is unlikely that we will see a shift back to pre-pandemic norms anytime soon.

So, what does this mean for business-customer relationships in the digital era? Without the experience of in-person shopping, online user experience has a strong influence over consumers’ buying decisions. As a result, brands must define their reputation as trustworthy and reputable providers by shaping their processes around customers’ online behaviours.

‘Digital trust’ is defined as the confidence users have in the ability of processes, people and technology to create a secure digital world, dividing the dependable services from the corrupt ones.

In a world where most people understand that not every online service is legitimate, establishing digital trust helps users decide which companies will keep their personal information safe. So, how can businesses gain the trust of their digital customers — and what will happen if they do not?

Why should businesses build digital trust?

When people make a purchase or interact with an online retailer, they demonstrate their digital trust in that business. However, the quality of the service is no longer defined by how an interface looks or how easy it is to navigate.

Customer expectations have evolved with digitisation. Driven by rapid device proliferation and improved internet connectivity, the modern online shopper expects to encounter seamless digital processes from sign-in to purchase — particularly since the pandemic, which increased the number of people using online services regularly.

Today, customers are more aware of how their data is being used and stored and base their shopping behaviours on a provider’s ability to ensure security. The Okta Digital Trust Index (2021), which surveyed 13,000 office workers, found that 88% of people in the UK were unlikely to purchase from a brand they did not trust. And according to a recent report on the 20 most-trusted UK retailers, 58% of consumers are highly conscious about their safety when shopping online, citing identity theft as a significant concern.

Plus, with most businesses working online in some capacity, the government is introducing more regulations for using technology to use and manage digital identities. A new digital ‘trust framework‘ was announced earlier this year to make sharing digital identities between users easier and safer, allowing more control over what personal information is available to different services and organisations.

There are several ways businesses can generate a loyal digital customer base — from generating positive customer reviews to providing excellent customer service. But when it comes to digital trust, three main factors make people in the UK more likely to trust a brand: its service reliability, good security policies and quick response times — all of which can be facilitated by successful digital transformation.

Building digital trust with digital transformation

Cyber security is an essential consideration for organisations undergoing digital transformation, which involves implementing technology to automate processes, encourage a more cyber-aware business culture, increase security and refine the user experience. As such, retailers must ensure data is protected from a cyber breach to remain compliant and secure digital customers — and keep them coming back.

According to Okta’s survey, 47% of UK people permanently stopped using a firm’s services after hearing of a data breach. As such, IT professionals are harnessing advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning to support existing traditional threat models and automate risk management to reduce the overall probability of falling victim to a cyber attack.

Many organisations are also taking a ‘zero-trust’ approach to cyber security, which means that no activity within a network is trusted straight away. Every device, service, application or user connected by a network must go through a robust identity and access management process to gain a least privileged level of trust and associated access entitlements. As such, implementing a zero-trust framework helps bolster cyber security and minimises the likelihood of a breach.

Effective customer identity and access management (CIAM) solutions will also enable organisations to capture and interpret customer profile data to inform customised user experiences whilst controlling secure access to services and applications. A robust CIAM solution may involve implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA), self-service account management and single sign-on (SSO) to minimise friction, increase engagement and develop trust in business processes over time.