Sun & Ski Sports wanted a true 360-degree view of its customers.
The sporting goods retailer wanted to know who its customers were, which channels they were shopping and which marketing channels were most effective for them. But when all that customer data is stored in separate platforms, that’s no small feat.
Sun & Ski decided to employ customer relationship management platform AgilOne Inc. based on its ability to incorporate and store ecommerce data in one repository and scale as the retailer grows, said Jennifer Skeen, senior vice president of omnichannel at Sun & Ski.
The AgilOne platform also had an easy-to-use interface and good visual representation of its data, said Skeen, who spoke with Digital Commerce 360 at the National Retail Federation conference this month. The platform made it easy for the retailer to pull reports and see trends, she said.
The retailer began working with AgilOne in 2017 and went live with the program in October 2018. Within the year, the retailer identified the business cases it wanted to use the platform for, connected the platform to its various software programs, performed tests, tweaked and conducted more tests, Skeen said. Also during this time, Sun & Ski upgraded its Enterprise Resource Planning system, which was challenging to do simultaneously, she said.
Sun & Ski also hired a data analyst, a position it never had in the company before, to use the now-live AgilOne platform and identity trends within its new trove of data, Skeen said. For example, in spring 2019, Sun & Ski made some tweaks to the consumers who received its direct mail marketing pieces. In previous years, if Sun & Ski sent out an ad in the mail, the retailer measured its success by looking to see if its revenue increased over the previous year, she said. However, it was hard for the retailer to tie the revenue increase directly to the campaign. And doing so was a very manual process, she said.
Now that it has a better idea of who its customers are, where they are shopping for which products and how often, it can send the direct mail piece to a more targeted group of shoppers who would be interested in the product it is promoting. It can also break them down into active shoppers or shoppers who haven’t purchased in the past 6 months or 1 year. Sun & Ski also will have control groups that don’t receive the mail piece, so it can compare the return on its ad spend and more accurately measure its success, Skeen said. With the new campaigns, Sun & Ski has had a 50% increase in revenue attributed to direct mail, she said.
“Direct mail still works,” Skeen said. “I know all that’s talked about is our budget has gone to digital, but direct mail has a part in our world. It’s just how to make sure it’s optimized and the audience we are sending it to makes sense.”
In the next 3 months it hopes to apply similar segmentation and controls to its social media and its email marketing. Right now, the retailer does not personalize its emails and doesn’t factor in offline data, such as if a shopper purchased an item in the store. The new data will allow the retailer to better target shoppers.
Sun & Ski’s plans
Next, Sun & Ski wants to add the AgilOne data into its fraud prevention software. The more data that flows into its fraud prevention software, the better, Skeen said. For example, a common flag for fraud is the billing and shipping address might not match. A criminal may even provide his own phone number with the fraudulent order in case the retailer sees something suspicious with the order and has customer service call to verify the order.
If Sun & Ski had its customer relationship data flowing into its fraud prevention software, the customer service agent could see whether a separate phone number exists in the customer data profile—one that the shopper more frequently uses. The agent could then use the second phone number to verify the order.
“It will help us increase our ability to spot fraud and increase our chargeback rates,” Skeen said. A chargeback is when a consumer reports to her credit card company that she received a charge from a retailer for a purchase she did not make, or a fraudulent transaction. The credit card company then charges the retailer for this order, and so the retailer loses the product and has to pay the cost to the credit card company.
An improvement in its chargeback rate will help the retailers’ profitability and improve customer service. Shoppers are always appreciative of the phone call to verify an order to a different address, even if it’s not fraud, Skeen said.
Also in the works for 2020, Sun & Ski plans to roll out buy online pick up in store before the holiday season, Skeen said. The retailer already has ship-to-store functionality, meaning its employees already have a process for receiving an order intended for a customer that will come to the store to pick it up. However, it needs to ensure it trains employees to pick several orders for a customer coming in within 4 hours, she said.
“It’s the culture change; it’s the labor and the human element that we have to train,” she said.
Sun & Ski Sports is owned by Retail Concepts Inc., No. 1313 2019 Digital Commerce 360 Next 1000. Digital content management platform Acquia announced it would acquire AgilOne in 2019.
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