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Boots
Boots The Chemists Gets a Business Intelligence Makeover with MicroStrategy
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Boots The Chemists, a leading health and beauty retailer with 1,400 stores in the United Kingdom, is using MicroStrategy’s business intelligence platform to drive its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) efforts and develop more effective personalized marketing offers. |
Boots The Chemists employees are using MicroStrategy's technology to analyze customer purchases made through its Advantage Card loyalty program. The resulting insight is reducing customer churn, increasing revenues and developing long-term relationships with customers.
These days, retailers and e-retailers are moving quickly to better know their customers. With the right CRM technology application, businesses can understand what their customers need so that they can offer the right product and service to each individual. For Boots The Chemists, the UK's leading health and beauty retailer with over 1,400 stores across the United Kingdom, the introduction of its Advantage Card loyalty program and its selection of MicroStrategy as a key analytical tool helped turn its CRM vision into reality.
With MicroStrategy's business intelligence technology, employees are analyzing customer activity for 12 million weekly customer visits to its stores, and turning that information into more effective marketing practices. The real benefit behind the Advantage Card program, insists Crawford Davidson, Head of Advantage Card, is the insight to customer activity.
"With some 12 million customer visits to our stores each week, we needed to be able to understand customer behavior to enable us to tailor our services," explained Davidson. "The Advantage Card provides three key benefits: insight into customer behavior, immediate loyalty, and targeted marketing offers."
MicroStrategy AgentT brings integrated query, reporting, and analysis functions to end users and runs against an IBM SP/2 platform with a DB/2 based data warehouse. With MicroStrategy tapping into an IBM-built data warehouse, analysts at Boots The Chemists know their customers and their preferences, and are using the information that MicroStrategy Agent generates to build, maintain and leverage personalized, one-to-one relationships with Boots' customers.
"We developed a range of standard complex reports in MicroStrategy that cover a broad spectrum of business scenarios such as demographic profiling, basket analysis, shopper profiling and direct marketing response," said Ian Radmore, Advantage Card Project Manager at Boots The Chemists. For instance, employees are conducting customer analysis on a wide range of product purchases -- including cross-departmental products such as hair care and skin care -- for different segments of its customer base, and determining what products are more or less appealing to each customer segment.
Staying Up to Speed
The CRM functions MicroStrategy enables provides Boots The Chemists with invaluable information that has enormous revenue, efficiency and cost savings benefits. With MicroStrategy, Boots can discover which customer segments require more marketing attention. "Insight is the hardest thing to measure but it provides increasing value to the business," added Davidson.
With the company running 250 promotions every month, Boots needed to segment customers according to purchases made before, during and after a particular promotion. An activity that typically took several hours of intensive data manipulation to assess the results of just one promotion now takes a few minutes of data input and a report that runs in minutes. As a result, analysts spend more time drawing insight from the information instead of compiling it.
Boots also uses MicroStrategy to facilitate direct mail campaigns. MicroStrategy Agent generates information that automatically flows into the Direct Marketing application. "We have simplified the whole campaign management process," said Radmore. "The management of promotions, such as ensuring that mailings get to the appropriate people, is handled automatically."
Guaranteeing a Personalized Experience for the Shopper
Boots is currently using MicroStrategy business intelligence software to make the information available to a broader user base. "The information already touches all areas of the business through the intense analysis undertaken by the customer insight team," said Radmore. "However, we recognize that there is clear potential to make this available to more people and start to use it to directly drive performance, to manage the customers more proactively, and to move further along the CRM path."
According to Radmore, retailers will communicate with the customer via mobile phone, digital TV, Internet, kiosks, in-store contact, mailing and telephone. "The consumer will select the way they want to contact a brand," continued Davidson. "We must ensure that we have a single view of the customer so that however they contact Boots, the brand and their personalized proposition is the same."
To achieve this, Boots will expand upon the data warehouse infrastructure to build a new campaign management solution that encompasses all customer interactions, including customer attitudes and the likelihood of customers to have seen specific promotional material such as TV advertising. "The number of customer contacts is infinite and to maximize our customer relationships, we need a self-learning system," explained Davidson. "We need to be able to deliver personalization which can only be achieved through automation -- where the consumer is the stimulus for an offer, and their reaction to that offer prompts the next offering."
Davidson believes that MicroStrategy will continue to deliver valuable customer insight, resulting in loyal, satisfied customers. "The goal is to increase our share of purse by meeting each consumer's entire health and beauty needs. We have the underlying IT architecture, and with MicroStrategy's business intelligence solution, we will build a learning system that will enable Boots The Chemists to deliver truly personalized customer propositions. |
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Boots The Chemists needed to analyze valuable customer purchasing behavior gathered through its Advantage Card loyalty program, and turn it into more effective marketing strategies. |
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Using MicroStrategy's business intelligence technology to tap an IBM-built data warehouse, Boots The Chemists employees can analyze, predict, and maximize the value of each customer relationship. |
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Better insight into customer behavior leads to more effective one-to-one marketing offers.
MicroStrategy's technology drives customer loyalty efforts, increases profitability, and reduces customer churn. |
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“The goal is to increase our share of purse by meeting each consumer's entire health and beauty needs. We have the underlying IT architecture, and with MicroStrategy's business intelligence solution, we will build a learning system that will enable Boots The Chemists to deliver truly personalized customer propositions.”
Crawford Davidson
Head, Advantage Card
Boots The Chemists |
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