“As the Internet has grown in volume and importance to us as a business, it’s become important for us to improve our capture of electronic data,” says Neil McGowan, CIO of J D Williams & Co.
Features
Case Study
Browsing for Internet insight
Leading UK retailer J D Williams leverages Web analytics to improve the shopping experience and drive sales.
by Cheryl D. Krivda
As catalog and Internet transactions rival in-store sales, finding new ways to anticipate, understand and market to shoppers’ desires is essential to maintaining sales and satisfying customers. Yet with no shopkeepers or sales clerks to interact with consumers, how can online retailers best meet their needs?
At J D Williams & Co. Ltd., the United Kingdom’s leading direct home shopping company, Web analytics is providing a solution. Asubsidiary of N Brown Group, J D Williams offers more than 20 catalog brands of clothing and other products, specializing in larger-size womenswear and menswear.
Using Teradata solutions, J D Williams has deployed an innovative approach to capture browsing data from online shopping sessions. By loading this data into its enterprise data warehouse (EDW) from Teradata and using customer insight software from Teradata partner Speed-Trap Ltd., the company is gaining insight into customers’ intentions—enabling it to take advantage of new targeted marketing opportunities, in real time.
“We always strive to have a complete picture of our customers,” explains Neil McGowan, CIO of J D Williams. “As the Internet has grown in volume and importance to us as a business, it’s become important for us to improve our capture of electronic data to improve our understanding of how customers are interacting with our Web sites, how they are serving themselves, and what items they have browsed but not bought.”
Online opportunity
Leveraging Web data to gain business insight is not new to the company. J D Williams has long used its Teradata customer relationship management (CRM) portfolio and EDW to track individuals’ purchases, preferences and interactions across multiple channels. But as the percentage of Internet sales grew—from just a small percentage to 39% of overall business this year—it became more important to gain a deeper understanding of how consumers interact with the company.
Internet sales also present a new challenge. With electronic retailing, merchants and marketing teams are more aggressive in their tactics—adjusting prices more dynamically and changing the way information is presented on the Web in order to market more effectively.
“Each time data is changed on the site, the interaction with the customer changes,” McGowan says. “We realized we needed that feedback. Without it, we had a gap in our capabilities.”
"We’ve only scratched the surface with this technology by providing the business with an enormously rich source of data for them to investigate. They are very excited about it."
—Neil McGowan, CIO, J D Williams & Co.
Best intentions
To meet this need, J D Williams deployed a Teradata Integrated Web Intelligence solution that includes Speed-Trap customer insight software. As part of this solution, the company also upgraded its data warehouse platform, extended its use of Teradata CRM products and engaged Teradata Professional Services.
Once the solution was launched, J D Williams began feeding continuous, massive streams of fresh Web data into the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse. The deeper visibility into customer interactions provided during a four-week trial period convinced the company of the solution’s value.
The EDW now serves as the core data analysis engine, helping the company understand what customers are doing, how products are selling and the products’ appropriateness for customers. Speed-Trap captures the clickstreams of shoppers’ activity on the corporate Web sites. These clickstreams are then filtered and inserted into the data model.
“We are integrating that data within Teradata Relationship Manager and incorporating it into our traditional marketing and campaign models,” McGowan says.
“In the future, this will allow us to enrich those models, perform deeper segmentation and execute more focused campaigns based on our enhanced understanding of customer behavior.”
The new system expands J D Williams’ customer knowledge from a strictly historical perspective to a real-time behavioral view. “We knew the history of what a customer purchased, and we could compare that with what they did in other channels,” he adds. “For the first time, we have information on what customers are looking at and what they are interested in. We know what they put in a shopping basket but never bought, what they’ve clicked on, and where they’ve been. And we can use that information to enhance our understanding of each customer.”
New sales opportunities
Analysts are also finding new ways to use the business intelligence (BI) provided by Web analytics to increase sales. At the simplest level, users can collect data about abandoned online shopping carts. They can also investigate “dropped demand” by identifying items viewed by a consumer that were not available in the desired size or color.
Early results indicate that fewer than 20% of customers who abandon a shopping basket return and purchase these products through the Internet or another channel. “As we know who these customers are,” says McGowan, “this provides an excellent opportunity for us to market to them and try to close the sale.”
Such revenue-boosting activities fall into two categories: near real time and same session. The solution can load information from the Web site into the data warehouse in a few minutes. This provides real-time intelligence that will soon allow the company to make offers while the customer is still browsing online.
Profit from customer knowledge
Although McGowan cannot divulge specific benefits provided by the Web analytics solution, he is certain that they will soon add up to increased profitability for J D Williams.
“We’ve only scratched the surface with this technology by providing the business with an enormously rich source of data for them to investigate. They are very excited about it,” he says. “They can now study, model, map and segment all of these things they want to know about our customers’ interaction with our Internet sites. Merchandisers and marketers are very interested in utilizing these new data sets in order to enhance their models over the coming months.” Yet McGowan realizes that maximizing the benefits of Web analytics will take time. “What’s important is that we gain business knowledge and insight from this information to improve the way our models work,” he adds. “Over the next 12 months, we will deepen our level of understanding on how customers interact with us and how we use this knowledge to provide a more relevant experience for our customers. The challenge is for the business to use this technology platform to significantly enhance our capability.”
Cheryl D. Krivda writes about the intersection of business and technology for publications and corporations around the world.
Photography by Matthew Stansfield
