Achieving digital transformation by modernizing 30-year infrastructure

Cognizant helps retailer overcome data integration challenges for enhanced personalization, increased digital growth and improved customer experience.

A national clothing and shoe retailer was seeking to enhance its capabilities to hyper-personalize the shopping experience. A data modernization initiative began, but infrastructure had other plans. The disparate, unintegrated back-end systems that incorporated dozens of data sources were unable to communicate with each other. As a result, the business couldn’t utilize most data being reported by developers.

Unable to deliver the personalized customer experience required to drive growth, the company recognized the need for marketing and data experts with strategic and technical expertise to successfully guide the team through a cloud marketing suite implementation. It also required establishing a sustainable operating model that could support day-to-day operations and enable teams to scale.

By partnering with Cognizant, and through ongoing collaboration, the retailer was able to solve difficult challenges, including:

• Migration to a new marketing tech suite that would implement business units and establish a data foundation for enhanced personalization
  
  
• Implementation of a new integrated data lake to build a harmonized model with dozens of data sources
  
  
• Development of a personalization platform to enable stronger personalization and segmentation in order to improve the customer experience
  
  
• Refinement of the loyalty management program by performing an audit and providing a recommendations roadmap

With access to enhanced data analytics, personalization and communication capabilities, the retailer’s marketing team has connected with customers more effectively, ensuring they have comfortable, stylish clothing that they are proud to wear. 

By delivering a more personalized communications via email when a customer has abandoned “browse” or “cart,” one use case showed the following results:

• Decrease in abandoned carts through a 4.3% increase in purchasing rates
  
• 174% increase in digital revenue growth across all channels
• 90% decrease in manual chat interventions