Industry
Retail
Omnichannel CX and Intelligent Innovation – The Future of Retail
Highlights
- ICA embarked on a digital transformation journey by revisiting their customer loyalty program strategy and becoming a customer-centric, data-driven organization with a holistic, 360-degree customer view.
- This helped the retailer make both personalized and goal-based offer allocations to customers in near real-time.
- The offer redemption rate for flagship communications increased fourfold to between 22% and 42%.
On this page
Overview
ICA Sverige, a leading Swedish grocery retailer, wanted a holistic view of customers to enable hyper-personalization as part of their loyalty transformation program.
The company, with over 1,200 stores in different formats, also operates multiple other lines of businesses, including banking, insurance, and pharmacy, besides retail, which is their flagship business.
ICA Sverige partnered with TCS for digital transformation of the marketing function across the enterprise to strengthen their customer loyalty program strategy.
Challenge
The Swedish retailer wanted to shift from product-centricity to customer-centricity to enable hyper-personalization.
For this, they had to transform into a data-driven organization.
Moreover, to retain their leadership position in the Nordics, ICA Sverige wanted to improve brand stickiness by transforming their loyalty program. A pre-requisite for this was a holistic customer view—the company required a single, unified view of all its customers.
Additionally, the retailer was faced with the following challenges:
- 99% of customer communication was through physical letters, and there was no digital marketing capability to interact with customers.
- Campaign communication cycle time was between three and five weeks.
- There was no standardized way to measure campaign effectiveness.
- Offer allocation to customers was rule-based (for instance, making an offer to customers shopping for more than 1,000 kronor) as customer behavior data was not captured due to a lack of customer persona-based segments for targeted communications.
- Very low offer redemption rates as rule-based offers had little relevance to customers.
Solution
TCS developed a data analytics platform to provide a unified view of customer data in near real-time.
The unified view enabled ICA to become a data-driven organization.
As the strategic IT partner to ICA Sverige, TCS studied the retailer’s customer strategy to identify gaps and proposed the to-be state by outlining the business priorities.
After a thorough assessment of customer information maturity, data and analytics capability, industry benchmarking, and target architecture and realization roadmap, TCS helped ICA build a data hub that offered a 360-degree customer view in near real-time.
ICA also realized the need for a digital marketing suite, and TCS helped them identify the right product. Data from the digital marketing suite was also ingested into the data platform for a more holistic view of customers.
The data platform provides the foundation data on customers for all marketing initiatives of ICA. All downstream applications can fetch these customer insights for comprehensive marketing campaigns, thus strengthening ICA’s loyalty program.
The TCS solution enabled ICA to optimize digital marketing strategies by leveraging curated customer data, which resulted in increased customer engagement through targeted marketing campaigns.
TCS further empowered the data platform with capabilities to transform it into a real-time marketing data hub—a data and analytics platform to support advanced analytics use cases by leveraging new-age tech stack, thereby optimizing the overall associated cost.
Benefits
The TCS solution enabled ICA to offer targeted, hyper-personalized campaigns to customers, improving customer experience significantly.
- The data platform, with strong customer data, enables effective targeted personalized marketing and provides a means to measure customer engagement with these personalized marketing. It provides the foundation for algorithmic recommendation enabling hyper-personalization. This has resulted in higher redemption rate to the tune 22%-42% across flagship campaigns.
- A 360-degree customer view enables advanced analytics use cases, and also creates and leverages dynamic customer segments in line with business priorities.
- The data platform helps ICA identify and decommission non-performing campaigns. The bottom 20% of non-performing campaigns in terms of monetary impact and customer engagement are periodically discontinued.
The other benefits include:
- Near-real-time campaign communication cycles
- 800-plus customer attributes monitored
- 1.6 million SEK ($0.15 million) annual savings in licensing cost
- Five touchpoints enabled to track customer behavior
“TCS’ Customer 360 framework-enabled data platform is powering the marketing department at ICA with key data on customers, offers, and campaigns, enabling the marketing unit to target ICA’s customers with relevant and personalized offers.”