Case study: Customer Intelligence

For a large shoe retailer with several stores and an online shop, COSMO CONSULT developed a solution to find a suitable range of products to be shown in newsletters and the online store. This enables the company to automatically address each customer individually.

• Using targeted customer approach for up- and cross-selling
• Providing individual customer preferences and product features
• Increasing the conversion rate and sales
• Developing individual parameters and scenarios

A well-known chain store in the shoes industry with a successful online store planned to upgrade their e-mail newsletter to customers with individual product suggestions in order to create further incentives for customers to purchase their products. COSMO CONSULT was asked to develop an automated solution to generate the right products for each respective customer. In addition to the shopping behaviors of customers, further restrictions and special requirements relating to the industry had to be considered. Since most of the sales are generated by customer cards, detailed information such as the shopping behaviors, age, gender, etc. of each individual customer was available.

After joint workshops, the project team started by dividing the customer base into different categories to generate uniform customer groups. Then, the data basis was examined for consistency to remove any incorrect entries. Another important issue was to determine the product affinity of customers. To do so, the project team had to find out whether a customer prefers branded products or looks for affordable ones. The industry-specific expert knowledge of the client was particularly helpful in that regard. The information available was summarized in an a priori algorithm using the statistical software R so that all of the products in the range could be evaluated.

Based on the affinities, the products with the highest potential were subsequently determined for each individual customer. The results provided by the algorithm were sent directly to the Salesforce CRM system. To visualize the results of the data analysis, the project team added a dashboard using Shiny R that clearly displays the history and suggestions of each customer along with the underlying rules. In addition, the customer-specific product suggestions are organized in a table and transmitted daily to the shoe retailer.

With the help of Salesforce, automated newsletters can be sent to specific customer groups or the entire customer base based on the individual product suggestions. Every single newsletter is customized to the respective personal shopping behaviors of each customer. Thus, not only is the targeted customer approach guaranteed, but promotions and remainders are also particularly taken into account in the product suggestions, and hence other goals can also be achieved by the solution.