Gain, understand, and use key figures to create value.
Our client had already made and realized the decision to implement a cross-channel customer care program. However, the value and benefits of the customer data platform were unclear. This also meant that the potential of the program remained unused. valantic created transparency and optimized the KPI-based marketing control.
Our client is a German DIY retail chain with over 500 European stores. The sector is characterized by many established players. Therefore, growth potential lies mainly in optimizing all digital business activities and fully exploiting the benefits of digitalization.
Challenge
A digital cross-channel customer care program had replaced an analog customer card. But to what benefit? The program’s impact on the company’s sales and profits was unclear.
Consulting Approach
valantic quantified the value contribution of the Customer Data Platform by modeling the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and determining the influence of various customer attributes.
Client Benefit and Solution
Based on the transparency gained and the common understanding of all stakeholders, the client can optimally control marketing measures and allocate overall budgets more objectively.
Christoph Nichau
Partner & Managing Director
”With the help of our customer experience teams, the most successful customer loyalty program in Germany had already been established. Our mission was now to develop the communication and decision-making paperfor the discussion from management to shareholders.“
Oliver Niehues
Senior Consultant
”Our team was already in possession of numerous "data treasures", so it was no longer up to us to "dig" into the data, but to merge it and extract the maximum value.“
A few years ago, our client replaced the analog loyalty card with a comprehensive customer support program to continue growing through digitalization in the face of tough competition from DIY stores. The newly created cross-channel platform (to which all customer card users were also migrated) is used to manage various marketing activities and optimize the entire e-commerce area.
The aim was to use the data transparency gained to make progress in both new customer acquisition and existing customer business. However, due to the complexity of the various customer activities, this progress could only be measured to a limited extent. There also needed to be more clarity as to how exactly the value contribution of the customer data platform should be modeled and quantified.
In a first step, the consulting team analyzed historical monthly, quarterly, and annual cohorts in terms of their customer lifetime value. It used this as a basis to quantify the influence of different customer attributes on sales and contribution margins. This enabled the consultants to validate and supplement existing experience on the impact of marketing campaigns, promotions, and new customer measures.
As part of a workshop, the consultants worked with the client’s team to collect, categorize, and prioritize all static and influenceable customer attributes based on existing CRM and ERP data. For selected relevant customer attributes, the valantic consultants created a detailed CLV analysis and developed proofs of concept (PoCs) to validate these historical results in the future.
After recording the relevant business logic of the customer care program with the help of a value driver tree, the valantic consultants identified appropriate sales drivers. They anchored them in a bottom-up forecast model, which was “fed” with the previously gained insights.
Based on the value driver tree and the analyses, the consulting team worked with the relevant stakeholders to develop a model that enables the concrete quantification of the value contribution based on relevant KPIs.
These results are now available to our client in a comprehensive communication document. This is used throughout the company to communicate the functionality and quantified value contribution of the customer care program uniformly and to create a shared understanding of the program’s benefits.
In this project, the valantic consultants provided the client with three valuable work results:
The valantic consultants’ analyses help the company understand its customers better, derive marketing measures based on specific customer attributes, and better allocate its marketing budget.
In addition, existing controlling dashboards were expanded with the CLV analyses to recognize declining CLVs earlier and to be able to react to them.
A new forecast model replaces the existing annual planning. The client can now plan more granularly and provide more accurate sales planning based on historical performance.
The comprehensive communication document written by the valantic project team creates a uniform understanding of how the customer care program works. This shared basis strengthens interdisciplinary cooperation and improves the cross-departmental management of new and existing customer measures.
Overall, valantic was able to achieve numerous optimizations for the client:
Ability to make data-based decisions on strategic challenges
Improved overall budget allocation
Focusing marketing campaigns on high-value customer groups
Implementation of tailored customer loyalty measures
Scaling of the customer care program
Increase company value in the long term
valantic helps companies to identify growth potentials, to set up efficient marketing and sales processes, and to optimize all marketing and sales activities based on KPIs.
Christoph Nichau
Partner & Managing Director
valantic Private Equity Practice