It’s time for another Customer Spotlight! The coolest part of our work is seeing what magic our Amperity users create with data.
Helen in five:
Senior Product Manager of Personalization, Endeavour Group
Has consulting experience in digital analytics for over 10 years across a wide range of industries (Insurance, Telecom, Media, Gaming, Retail, Charities)
Specializes in understanding customer problems and finding solutions for them
Uses Amperity data to power the “Next Best Action” Decision Engine that runs their email marketing
Used to be a long distance runner and is now training to walk a virtual marathon
What are you responsible for as a Senior Product Manager?
My main focus is understanding what customer problems are and trying to find meaningful solutions for them. For my team, that means trying to see how we can use personalization to create better customer experiences.
I work with two different squads — one uses data assets to create a rich understanding of our customer, and then uses those insights to activate through our different digital marketing channels. The other is in charge of personalizing our app and web experiences.
How has Amperity data influenced your role?
Using Amperity data we were able to build a “Next Best Action” Decision Engine which we deploy and run all of our email marketing through for Dan Murphy's. We are now using this engine to start personalizing our app experiences. Amperity data is the foundation of the decision engine, and has given us the ability to select the right product, offer, and customer, and then send through personalized communications at the right time.
What teams do you work with or support? What does this entail?
My team is a part of Endeavour X, our digital business unit. We bring together the best of design, data, and technology to create new solutions for our customers and work closely with our brands' marketing, loyalty, and merchandising teams.
What was the state of your data prior to Amperity?
Before Amperity, our data was messy and siloed across many different brands. In the beginning we really looked to Amperity to help us quickly stitch data together so that we could have a single view of the customer. We really began by focusing on analytics and just trying to understand our customer better.
Now that you’ve been running Amperity for several years, how has your use of data changed?
As we’ve developed, we've worked with Amperity to activate the data. The focus over the last year or so has been around creating different customer audience segments based on the different attributes we’re uncovering, and syndicating those out to hydrate our different marketing platforms. We're now connected to our CRM platform, Facebook, and our DMP so that we can orchestrate those audiences out across a variety of different channels and power our digital marketing campaigns and activity.
How does Amperity help power insights across your large portfolio of brands?
Amperity fuels all of our audiences, the decision engine, and our data analytics platform. Customers shop with different brands for different reasons, and that's where Amperity and personalization come in. Endeavour as a group has multiple loyalty programs and different drink brands that customers are engaging with. Amperity helps us bring all of those different customer identities together, enabling us to know our customers as one single person across all of the different brands in our group. It’s the fundamental cornerstone of our data that drives our personalization engine.
Is the same Amperity data used across all of your brands?
We've actually got different database views . One enables us to have a single Customer 360 across all Endeavour brands, and examine total behavior and attributes like lifetime value, how many brands they shop with, and the overall spend and frequency of purchase.
We also have brand specific views where we look at behavior within each brand and compare them to attributes in the Endeavour database. This is especially important because even though each brand has different opt-in permissions around communications, we're still able to access a full view of the customer and their overall behavior.
Why is this two-tiered approach beneficial?
The two-tiered approach gives us both the depth of insights that we want and the ability to activate at a brand level and get specific with our personalization. In Amperity, we get to see customers' total behavior across all brands, and both the categories and products they’re interested in. Through those individual views we’re able to activate and target from the right brand with the appropriate messaging. It also helps make sure we’re not emailing the wrong customer from the wrong brands.
"We’ve crunched billions of data points to be able to select audiences and send millions of emails each week that are all personalized for each individual customer."
Has Amperity changed the way you've been able to get work done or saved you time in any areas?
For sure! It's been a massive change of pace for our digital marketing teams. It used to take a really long lead time to run targeted campaigns to specific audiences. Someone would have to write the brief, cut the data list, and then send the data to another team who then had to load it into the system. Now the segments are automatically refreshed after being set up and orchestrated. Now, our analyst teams get to focus on more valuable analytic activities instead of wasting time cutting and slicing data. It’s also given them more confidence in their audience segments, because they know that they’re more accurate. Before, we might have typically only refreshed an audience once a quarter or once every six months, but now that's just always on. It allows us to expand the number of audiences that we can support way quicker because the time to set up and orchestrate them is much faster now with Amperity — I’d say we have about 50+ audiences orchestrating out of the Amperity platform.
What's the coolest thing you've been able to do with data?
I think our personalization engine, which the whole team has developed over the last six months, is probably the coolest thing that I've been involved in. We’ve crunched billions of data points to be able to select audiences and send millions of emails each week that are all personalized for each individual customer, with the best product and offer, and scheduled to be sent at the most optimal day/time.
When I was doing data and analytics like 20 odd years ago, we would talk around this idea of having a single view of the customer, and I've been in several organizations who have attempted to try and create that. But I think it's only been in the last few years and what we’ve done with Amperity that makes me think we actually have created that now.
Has anything surprised you since implementing Amperity?
One thing that surprised me was actually being able to see cross-brand activity and having the ability to quantify it. Having those insights has really helped inform strategy.
It sounds like you’ve been able to do so much so far; what’s next?
I'm looking forward to using our digital data to see what products customers are viewing and their interests so that we can gather signals of intent. A lot of what we've got in Amperity at the moment is powered off of purchasing transaction data, so next we’re also thinking about how we can bring in feedback from customers as well. These are the kinds of things that really excite me.
Apart from keeping Endeavour's personalization engine running smoothly, what do you love to do in your spare time?
I used to be a long distance runner and did marathons and ultras. I don't actually run much these days, but I do lots of walking and hiking. We're three months into our second lockdown in Australia, so I've been doing a walk every day. I’m currently training to walk a virtual marathon! And also collecting & enjoying lots of wine — I think it's a hazard of the job.
Thank you Helen!
About Endeavour United behind a common purpose of ‘Creating a more sociable future together’, Endeavour Group is the largest hospitality and drinks retailer in Australia. They are a 28,000+ strong team with more than 1600 stores and 330 hotels across the nation, including leading brands such as Dan Murphy’s, BWS, and ALH Hotels.
Stay tuned for more Customer Spotlights! In the meantime, you can check out previous installments here.