We’re back with another spotlight on one of our power users who brings the magic of customer data to their business each and every day. We love to share the cool things folks in our community do with Amperity so that others can get ideas and inspiration.
Jack in five:
Senior Marketing Analyst at Deckers Brands for three years
Makes data available to a wide array of teams across departments and brands with dashboards and reports
Champions democratization of data and trains business users on data tools to support their decision-making
Swears by Amperity’s SQL segment editor
Makes the most of the natural beauty in Santa Barbara on foot and on bike, together with his wife and their dog
What are you responsible for as a Senior Marketing Analyst?
I lead Deckers’ global consumer-analytics team – we work to foster data-driven decision-making at Deckers, primarily through the consumer data that we capture via our direct-to-consumer channels. My responsibilities range from the management of productizing data into easily digestible dashboards, to the socialization of insights & recommendations back to our business-partners that can action on them.
What teams do you work with or support? What does this entail?
I support all our brands (UGG/HOKA/Teva/Sanuk/Koolaburra), globally, across a wide variety of departments. Consumer data is relevant to so many different disciplines within a multi-brand, omnichannel company such as Deckers, so I would guess that throughout the 3 years I’ve been with the company, I’ve worked with almost every team. No two days are ever the same: on Monday, I may be building a dashboard that allows our HOKA product teams to see how customer demographics vary by shoe-type, and then on Tuesday, I could be presenting a purchase funnel analysis to our UGG eCommerce leadership. Generally, my day-to-day is a solid mix of heads-down quant-work and stakeholder-facing presentations, which is great as it keeps things fresh. Over the past year, we’ve put a lot of focus into democratizing data throughout the organization via self-serve dashboards, so a large part of my role has also included training our business teams to use these tools, enabling them to be more nimble in their decision-making.
Has your use of Amperity changed how you get work done?
Amperity has been of paramount importance to accelerating analytics at Deckers for a couple reasons. For one, being able to have confidence in your customer identity resolution is really the bedrock to any consumer analysis. With Amperity, we’re able to dissect how customers are stitched together at a very granular level, so if there is ever any question as to how a customer ID is generated, we’re able to speak to that with certainty. Additionally, Amperity plays well with a lot of our existing systems & vendors, in terms of both ingesting and egressing data, so we’ve experienced a level of consistency that we had not previously had with other CDP vendors. This has been a significant unlock for us in terms of streamlining our email segmentation. Lastly, we needed a CDP vendor that could be as nimble and agile as our team, which Amperity has delivered on. Being able to add a column to a table or set up a custom aggregation is a relatively quick process, which allows our analytics capabilities to move at the speed of the business.
Do you use a BI tool for data visualization and dashboards? Is this powered by Amperity?
Tableau is our primary tool for data visualization and dashboarding – it’s the number one way we get data & analysis into the hands of our stakeholders. We currently have over 20 dashboards that are actively used by our business teams where Amperity is the core source of data.
How does the organization use the information from the dashboards and/or segments you create?
The primary objective of our dashboards is always to uncover insights that can then be actioned upon. We gather requirements from our various stakeholders in terms of which KPIs/analyses are needed in order for them to optimize their tactics, and then we build a dashboard specific to each team’s individual needs. Our stakeholders can then use the dashboard to hindsight the results of past initiatives, as well as to plan for the future.
What kind of teams use these dashboards and what action do they take from them?
A couple examples:
We have various dashboards that break down our customers in terms of demographic attributes and purchase behavior, which our brand-leadership and product teams use to understand who their consumer is, so they can effectively position key styles in the marketplace. It also allows them to have a transparent view of how a customer base of a particular product changes over time, which aids in product lifecycle management.
We created a dashboard leveraging post-purchase survey data to illuminate which areas of the US over-indexed in terms of delivery issues/complaints – this allows our fulfillment teams to catch potential issues more effectively.
For our merchandisers, we set up a market-basket and product-propensity dashboard that provides a comprehensive view into which combinations of product categories/styles/colors are purchased both within the same order, and by the same customer across multiple orders. Seeing this data in aggregate allows them to optimize how they position different products together on the website and in-store.
What’s the coolest thing you’ve been able to do with data for Deckers?
The coolest thing we’ve done with data is really making it much more accessible throughout the organization and empowering the business units throughout the company by giving them the ability to be agile in terms of data-driven decision-making. A common issue that a lot of companies face is the high barrier-to-entry that’s involved with accessing data. We’ve been laser-focused on lowering that barrier for our stakeholders over the past year, making consumer data & analytics a core tenet of how our partners approach problems and make decisions. Amperity has been a major catalyst in these efforts.
What is your favorite feature/capability in Amperity and what do you use it for?
The interface for the SQL segment creator is probably my favorite feature in Amperity. Compared to other SQL drivers I’ve used in the past, it’s extremely easy to use. I especially like the Data Explorer feature – it’s super convenient to be able to reference that in the middle of writing a query, especially given how many different tables we have ingested.
Are you looking at data across all Deckers Brands? Have you changed the way you report on the portfolio since using Amperity?
We try to build out reports to be as global and brand-agnostic as possible so they can be used by a number of different teams throughout the organization – using Tableau filters & parameters, you can make a report relevant to so many different groups. Not only does this create a level of consistency across our dashboards, but also helps us scale training and adoption.
Would it surprise you to learn you’ve run 246 ad hoc segments since the beginning of the year? What sort of things are you doing with the segments you are running?
This doesn’t surprise me at all – we’ve been moving fast in terms of rebuilding our dashboard suite since signing on with Amperity, and the SQL segment editor has been an integral step in that process. My colleagues on the broader MarTech team have also done a ton of work in the segment editor in terms of developing fresh email-segmentation for each of our brands, to egress back to our marketing tools.
What’s one of your hobbies outside of work?
Deckers is located in Santa Barbara, CA which is perfect for my wife and me because we love the outdoors and the mountains. Our favorite activities include hiking with our Mini Australian Shepherd named Hans, running, and cycling. In 2020, I biked over 8,000 miles, including 500,000 ft of vertical gain.
Thanks to Jack for sharing, and for our readers, we'll be back soon with more Customer Spotlight! You can also check out earlier installments here.
Deckers uses Amperity built on AWS.
Not pictured: Jack
Jack's hiking partners
Jack biked a lot more than most of us in 2020