COVER STORY
The Netherlands and then further launches into Germany, France, Spain and Portugal.” Customer marketing is another key business
area with high dependency on reporting. With an operator shift towards 24-month contracts for more sophisticated, full-featured smartphones and tablets, Carphone Warehouse used to have limited engagement with customers during this period. It used its new BI systems to replace a number of legacy reports and locally maintained customer databases and develop a new marketing dashboard to combat this issue. After an initial pilot within the group customer marketing function, it is now live in all eight European territories. Scullion said that before MicroStrategy it was
difficult to customer gauge satisfaction levels. This was, “whether they were a Carphone Warehouse customer or a network customer or when a customer reaches the end of their network contract, do they come back to Carphone Warehouse?” And he confirmed at this year’s user conference that the MicroStrategy dashboards being used are providing greater insight into this side of the business than ever before. As a result of this success, the company is now preparing to extend this insight to store staff and
Start with a ‘top down’ rather than ‘bottom up’ approach
customers. Drawing on his experiences, Scullion advised those embarking on a BI roll out to start with the dashboard or database for a particular business area and, “not with existing reports,” he said. “Ask the business leads in that area what the key questions are they need answers to and what’s keeping them up at night. In that way, you can start with a ‘top down’ rather than ‘bottom up’ approach. It’s then based on those questions as how to start modelling the data.” Scullion said that retailers should be prepared
to look at different business areas for relevant data. “We then work with the data warehouse team to bring a new dataset in,” he added. He also said Carphone Warehouse was a “mature” data warehousing technology user, having now used its Netezza data warehouse alongside Informatica’s extract, transform and load (ETL) technologies with a “hierarchical approach” to drive its BI projects for some years now. In the immediate future, Scullion was not
able to confirm which tablet device would be used in the store consultants’ roll out. But he did say it would Android based, adding that the choice of tablet operating system, “involves no
www.retailtechnology.co.uk
Autumn 2013
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