Maya May, Senior Director of CRM & Strategy Analytics, Luxottica Retail – North America, admits that her company needed to overhaul its customer data process to effect deeper engagement and loyalty.
During her Thursday session, “Customizing for the Masses – Hear How Luxottica Does It,” at the 3rd Annual Engagement & Experience Expo, presented by Loyalty 360 – The Loyalty Marketer’s Association, May said she believes that data and customer understanding go hand-in-hand. But it’s hard to gain a deeper understanding and deeper engagement with your customers “when you have to re-introduce yourself every time you meet.”
Given the fact that Luxottica, a $17 billion company, is the world’s largest provider of eye glasses, and has countless customer interactions every day around the world, the burning question became: What’s the best way to use company data to achieve personalization goals?
“We’re a company built on amazing brands,” May said. “We wound up going down this path because we had a need for customer intimacy. Our DNA is products – exclusive, high-end, premium products.”
Luxottica is a 50-year-old company launched in Italy that holds a reverential attachment to the craftsmanship of its frames.
“We serve the end consumer and we care about loyalty over time,” May explained. “Customer loyalty and customer satisfaction is very important to us. Our customers want more personalized interactions. We can serve them better if we know our customers online and in stores.”
Luxottica’s data had been outsourced, May said, including multiple partnerships with different brands with minimal internal data intimacy. Through its partnership with Aginity, Luxottica’s company shift resulted in substantially raising the company profiles for data and analytics. The creation of a real-time Customer Experience Hub was profoundly impactful.
There was a decision made to “in-source” data and personalization capabilities. The key was figuring out how to “de-silo” and de-fragment fata across eight brands and 7,000 retail locations, while coordinating a single view of the customer. This data integration paved the way for Luxottica to add the personalized touch customers crave and provided the company with valuable, actionable customer insights.
“We needed a solid foundation and a vision to serve customers smack in the middle of the digital age,” May said.
For Luxottica, the data consolidation and integration is less about segmentation and more about identifying the critical attributes along the customer purchase path.
“That hub brought it all together in one spot and it’s been very powerful for us,” May said. “It’s put us in a more customer-centric model.”
Speed is everything, May said.
“We did a very quick proof of concept, gathered reports quickly, and presented them to management,” she said. “Speed was very palatable to our senior leaders. We put the foundation in place and hired a lot of new analytics people who figure out what are the processes that will be most impactful that will change the way we think about data.”
Luxottica’s growth in the data/personalization area will be based on predictive modeling.
“In the optical category, we want to be more predictive about when someone will repurchase,” May said. “Lifecycle cross-selling has successfully increased loyalty.. We’re trying to nail down the right time to target repurchases.”
May said some plans for the future include real-time website personalization; developing an analytics playbook to democratize usage and be highly extendable; smarter demand forecasting and assortment planning; and the new approach provides for global scale-up capabilities.
“We also want to use customer data to inform product decisions, and move away from pure product intuition,” May said. “We will be more grounded in customer insights. We have to invest in the tools and the talent.”