Written by James Goddard
Sales Lead
How a British Technology Retailer Harnessed Instant Data Insights to Boost Direct Sales
THE CUSTOMER
This leading British technology company established in the United Kingdom designs and manufactures household appliances. As of February 2018, they had more than 12,000 employees worldwide.
THE CHALLENGE
This customer’s direct sales operations span 31 different regions worldwide, across several different time zones and currencies. In each region, sales performance is tracked on different platforms, from Google to Adobe and SAP, with inconsistent formats. As a consequence, they had no overall view of sales performance at regional and global levels and reports were being manually compiled on a weekly basis.
They wanted to increase direct sales by 10% but without any centralised reporting layer, reports needed to be manually compiled on a weekly basis, and there was no way of verifying the accuracy of their contents – making it very difficult to influence the bottom line.
THE SOLUTION
The customer looked to Appsbroker for a solution that could converge different data sources into a centralised platform in a timely manner, provide quality assurance, and serve this information back out, measured against KPIs, in dashboards used by the business.
Appsbroker addressed the issue in three stages.
Firstly, the team created a conformed data layer via a data lake that brought the Google and Adobe Analytics data sources together into a single mutualised format. This allowed the customer to produce accurate reports, pulled daily, that could provide the insights that regions needed to make adjustments to sales strategies.
The next stage was to set up Looker dashboards per-region to display this information to the relevant teams, without requiring reports to be manually generated and compiled. This made it easier to identify areas for improvement, such as promotion of products that weren’t as successful.
Finally, additional data sources were configured to pull into the centralised reporting, including SAP sales, demographics and price scraping information to provide competitor analysis. Appsbroker also enabled the customer to add additional data sources easily into the platform to enrich their data analytics. An example would be competitor price scraping or GA demographics.
THE RESULTS
The data analytics platform has allowed the customer to improve their capability and drive direct sales to exceed their ambitious targets within a year. They can now provide answers to challenging questions in a competitive market and have transformed to a data-driven enterprise. Their confidence to move into peak trading and maximise opportunities is now possible due to the data quality insights they now have.
As direct business continues to grow, we are applying our engineering approach to build experiences online, using data to make improvements and rapidly test, measure and iterate solutions.
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