Natasha Cleary, Author at CACI

Unlocking seamless navigation with Braze’s central search function

Posted on: 20 February 2024

Braze’s recent navigation feature is a game-changer, offering users an enhanced and intuitive experience throughout the platform. In this article, I delve into the upgraded interface and focus on the central search function, a powerful tool designed to streamline user access and efficiency. So, how does it work, and what difference will it make for managing your campaigns and content?

What is Braze’s central search function feature and how does it work

At the core of Braze’s latest update lies the central search function, revolutionising how users interact with the platform. This dynamic tool allows users to find and access specific campaigns, canvases, email templates, segments and pages effortlessly by using keywords. Accessible via the top-of-the-dashboard search bar or keyboard shortcuts (⌘ + K for Mac, Ctrl + K for Windows), users can initiate a search with results instantly displaying below. The search results display both recent and archived content, minimising clicks and ensuring a seamless user experience.

The results you can see – explained

When you search using keywords, you will find the following results:

Campaign names: Find any campaign names that are active, stopped, drafted or archived.
Canvas names: Find any Canvas names that are active, stopped, drafted or archived.
Email template names: Locate templates in your template gallery.
Pages: Navigate to any page within Braze– whether it’s “Canvas”, “Data Exports” or “Webhook Templates”, you can land right on it.
Segment names: Find any segments that are currently active or have been archived.

Why is this feature so important?

The central search function is a gamechanger because it enables you to:

Rapidly locate and access active, stopped, draft, or archived campaigns and canvases
Effortlessly find email templates in your template gallery
Navigate directly to specific pages within Braze, such as “Canvas”, “Data Exports” or “Webhook Templates”
Locate both current and archived segments with ease.

Not only does this streamline navigation and accessibility across the platform by allowing users to quickly find and access what they need, its intuitive design, coupled with the ability to seamlessly access recently viewed content, transforms the user experience, catering to both new and experienced Braze users.

Keyboard shortcuts to keep in mind

Below are some of the easy keyboard shortcuts that you can use to navigate through the central search window:

Key takeaways

Efficient navigation overhaul: Braze’s latest update introduces a streamlined navigation interface, enhancing user accessibility and efficiency across the platform. The seamless design ensures users can effortlessly find and access key features, marking a significant improvement in the overall user experience.
Central search function as a power tool: The central search function emerges as a pivotal feature, allowing users to quickly locate campaigns, canvases, email templates, segments and pages with ease, along with being able to see their status categorised as active, stopped or archived.
Empowering marketing teams with precision: The central search function addresses common challenges faced by marketing teams by providing quick access to essential elements. This feature empowers marketers to navigate Braze effortlessly, fostering productivity and efficiency in campaign management and content creation.

If you’re interested in learning more about Braze or you’re a Braze user looking to maximise value, be sure to get in touch with us to speak to one of our experts.

Want to learn how to elevate your brand using Braze’s generative AI? Click here to read more.

New Year, New me? Reset, face out to the market, connect, and engage

Posted on: 3 January 2024

There has been a lot written in the past 18 months about how the pandemic realigned the way we were living. A moment in time that stretched into a phase that was different for literally everyone, affecting us all in different ways; young and old, key workers through to shop staff, blue collar workers and office employees. Just think for a moment about how different life is now, how you think it might have affected the above groups and how such a seismic shift defines who we are today, what we want from our lives, our relationships, our jobs and our future.

Key reflections in the new year

As we move into a New Year, even if we don’t make wholesale changes, I always find it to be a good time to reflect on where you are at, force a change – even a small one – and move into the New Year in a new gear.

In the last few years, those changes for me have been about reflecting on how we are conducting ourselves on a day-to-day basis and resetting into what is needed in the year ahead rather than drifting along with an adopted behaviour that you inherited post-Covid. I have been very keen to try to get colleagues to do the same.

Go out and see clients face to face, walk around the places we work on and have delivery meetings on client sites rather than on the dreaded Teams. While I’m fully aware of the benefits in time and travel that Teams has brought, I think it is incumbent on us all to ensure we use the channel in the right way, not just because it is the easiest thing to do. There will always be instances where face to face does make a lot more sense – think about it and make the effort!

Understanding the impact of consumers’ changing values and priorities

Working in consumer understanding at CACI, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot over the past 18 months, not just about the behavioural changes the pandemic has instilled in us, but how it has altered our values. In general, we have become much more particular about what we choose to do with our time away from home. Some groups, because of what home is to them (singles in smaller shared accommodation versus families in larger, out-of-town homes for instance), will have wildly different values based on that home set up, their life stage, affluence, etc. which maybe, or may not, be like their pre pandemic selves. However, how they value their time, effort and disposable income has definitely shifted.

The impact of the Cost of Living crisis has further evolved everyone’s position, with disturbing situations becoming everyday concerns. Simple things such as keeping warm, having a hot shower, or saving on electricity bills are driving the younger cohorts back to the office now more than the Boomer generation. That, and the realisation that without real face time with their peers and seniors, their careers may be stunted.

Gen Z Millennial Boomer office stats — CACI Cost of Living tracker 2023

Applying these learnings in real time: Revo takeaways

Beyond this change in ourselves, we have seen huge changes in the businesses and organisations we work with.

In this last year, I became a board member of the industry body, Revo – an organisation that has gone through wholesale change, not because of Covid per se, but because of what the market needs out of such industry groups. In the past, it was famed for a large-scale conference, held over three days in a regional city, overlapping with many other similar events and organisations. Today, it is very much reset as a not-for-profit organisation, run by the members, for the members.

It is focused on providing a community platform to connect next generation Revo Hub members with those who have a few years under their belts. Instead of a huge annual conference, we now provide smaller events, including the very recent Revo Awards ceremony at Control Room A in Battersea Power Station. On this night, we celebrated the achievements of the best in the business across marketing, asset management, regeneration and leasing. As Revo evolves, those members who contribute will do the same, with a focus on getting out into the market to explore and learn from these winning best practice examples.

Predictions for the future of our working world

So, thinking about the future changes; in our work world, 2023 was centered around the birth of generative AI, albeit over thirty years after the business world started using all forms of AI (under a different name). I no longer struggle to answer the question ‘What do you do for a living?’. While our world at CACI isn’t as straightforward as saying you work in Finance or Retail, with Generative AI for the masses now, I can (relatively) easily explain that I work in consumer data to support businesses like banks, using natural language in AI to categorise large volumes of calls data to better direct enquiries. Or, using AI on satellite imagery to create spatial wealth distribution indices for far flung places. Or, put more simply, use behavioural data (like GAI can) to enable better actions and interactions with customers and prospects.

My biggest goal moving into 2024, and one I would encourage colleagues and friends alike to adopt, is to just get out there and see places again. Make sure you are putting a value on that travel and time, but also make a concerted effort to get away from your screen (office or home), force a new experience, and share that. In a world where AI will take away the mundane tasks, it is even more important to enjoy the new experiences that these new repurposed places bring.

Have you got the right people performing the right tasks?

Posted on: 8 June 2023

At its most prosaic, competency management is simply a matter of ensuring that someone is adequately qualified to perform a role in your business. Basic things such as degree certificates and driving licences, where necessary, are straightforward to validate and highlight the competency of someone for a role. In industries where ongoing qualifications and re-training are required, however, competency management can be an altogether more challenging task.

Ongoing competency assessments are common in a lot of sectors. They can be things like regular eyesight checks for transport operators such as bus and train drivers, through to ongoing checks into the abilities of inspectors across various fields. How do you keep a track of when these tests are due and when they have been fulfilled?

A lot of records are maintained online. It is possible to verify the status of someone’s driving licence with the DVLA, for example, which makes basic checks very efficient and straightforward. For obvious reasons, firms which require that someone holds a valid driving licence in order to work for them would need to check this, then make a record of the fact that they have checked this. The risks in failing to fulfil such basic competency management checks are vast.

Similarly, criminal record checks are conducted easily online, which are something some companies will run on employees, especially where they are involved in care industries – it would be crazy not to check someone’s background before hiring them as a worker in a nursery or in the education system.

That is competency management that we are all familiar with. But what else can competency management unlock for firms? Where you have a multitude of employees, collating information on their backgrounds, qualifications and career paths can help you realise efficiencies in your processes by best placing them to conduct tasks which best fit with their competencies. This can be incredibly useful in assessing your existing workforce to cover for short- and medium-term shortages in personnel.

To use transport as an example, if a bus operator is experiencing staff shortages due to illness (a pertinent point during Coronavirus times), it makes sense to explore which of the remaining drivers has experience of the routes affected. Utilising a more experienced driver to cover gaps on a route makes more sense than using an inexperienced driver who would need to familiarise themselves with the route.

This has added implications for the drivers themselves, too. We have covered previously the alarming pre-eminence of fatigue amongst bus drivers; scheduling them to familiar routes and having a thorough understanding of who is appropriately positioned to drive which routes and when can play a fundamental role in running a safe and effective service.

Similarly, with inspection bodies it’s important that appropriately qualified inspectors are conducting relevant inspections in institutions such as schools and airports. The ongoing competency of such staff also needs to be regularly tracked. If inspections are undertaken by inadequately qualified staff, there can be a lengthy knock on affect. This can be time consuming where inspections are inappropriately marked by underqualified staff and must be re-run.

By having a clear understanding of each employee and their qualifications and experiences, it can make the task of scheduling and workforce management much easier, which in turn improves efficiency and results.

Competency management can play a vital role in ensuring that you have appropriately qualified practitioners in key roles. It can also check that your workforce is being efficiently deployed to deliver your services in safe and timely fashion. With the use of the right tools, it can go beyond the basic and help inform future work patterns, keeping the right people in the right places, undertaking the right tasks.

From Support to Sales: Unlocking the Potential of WhatsApp Business for Enterprises

Posted on: 2 May 2023

How WhatsApp and Braze are enabling conversational customer engagement, support, and overall business growth.

If you haven’t considered adding WhatsApp messaging to your business strategy, you could be missing out on an effective channel to power customer engagement, support, and overall growth.

Messaging apps are becoming the channel of choice for customers wanting to connect with businesses. In fact, a survey in 2020 discovered that 75% of respondents prefer this method compared to other channels.

With just over 2 billion monthly active users and an 85% penetration rate in parts of Latin America, Asia, and Europe, WhatsApp is currently the most popular messenger app worldwide, offering businesses massive consumer reach. Hundreds of enterprise businesses are already using WhatsApp Business Messenger to their advantage.

The most effective strategy for integrating WhatsApp begins with having a fit for purpose customer engagement platform that will enable your team to scale, streamline and unify your WhatsApp messaging. Braze, one of the leading customer engagement and cross channel marketing platforms has recently launched full WhatsApp capabilities.

What makes Braze the ideal customer engagement platform to integrate your WhatsApp strategy? Braze unifies your channels and messaging, to streamline and scale two-way conversations and minimize additional technology or marketing costs. If you’re interested in learning more about how Braze can enable your team, be sure to read our blog post “Accelerating value realisation with CACI and Braze”.

At CACI, we are committed to helping businesses discover new and effective ways to connect with their customers. We are excited to see how Braze is enabling enterprise businesses to launch and optimise their WhatsApp programs both in terms of audience size and use cases. From resolving customer support issues to sending personalised marketing messages, let’s explore some WhatsApp business use cases below.

WhatsApp messaging is resolving customer queries while minimising additional support resources.

Imagine a customer in a different time zone with a question about their recent purchase delivery date. Instead of having to wait to speak with a live support agent, a WhatsApp chatbot can automatically retrieve the customer’s order number and provide them with their delivery details, saving the customer time and eliminating the expense of a live customer support agent.

Another example is travellers opting in to receive anything from their boarding pass to flight information, such as changes in schedule or boarding gate, last call before the plane door closes, or even the baggage delivery belt on arrival, all via WhatsApp.

Figure 1: WhatsApp Messages to Resolve Travel Customer Support Queries.

WhatsApp is also effective for driving deeper customer engagement and conversions.

Businesses often struggle with cart abandonment or a loyal customer suddenly disengaging. Sending a personalized WhatsApp message along with a promotional code can be a quick-and-easy way to bring a customer back. In fact, one report found that click-through rates for cart abandonment messages via WhatsApp performed over eleven times better than SMS (36% vs. 3.2%).

Additionally, WhatsApp’s ability to insert dynamic content and link directly to web pages allows businesses to send engaged customers informational messages about new products, restocked product availability, and other exclusive benefits. These actions can be significant revenue drivers for your business.

Figure 2: WhatsApp Messages to Drive Conversions.

Leveraging a new platform also comes with unique challenges.

While the examples above support a growing business case for WhatsApp messaging, leveraging a new platform also comes with a unique set of challenges. Whether it’s finding the right customer engagement platform, understanding the short- and long-term financial impact, or operational considerations like upskilling internal teams, these are all key factors to consider. Far too often, businesses rush into adopting a new platform or channel without fully considering the financial, organizational, or customer impact. Unplanned or poorly executed strategies can be detrimental, both in terms of cost and reputation management.

How CACI can help

At CACI, we encourage businesses considering a new platform or channel to begin by identifying the customer needs, followed by platform or channel relevance, and finally business impact. If your business is interested in learning more about WhatsApp messaging or a customer engagement platform like Braze, CACI’s technology, data, and CX capabilities can help. Contact us to learn more.

CACI awarded Adobe’s Digital Experience Emerging Partner of the Year 2023

Posted on: 21 March 2023

London – 20th March 2023 – CACI is proud to announce that we have been awarded Adobe’s Digital Experience Emerging Partner of the Year 2023. Adobe’s Digital Experience partner awards acknowledge companies that have made significant contributions to Adobe’s business and have had a significant impact on customer success.

To secure this award, the team at CACI has demonstrated a strong level of investment and engagement in the Adobe partnership. This is measured through solution licensing, services, and the number of certifications and specializations held. We have also worked closely with Adobe to ensure that our relationship is of the highest quality and that we are working together to drive value for our clients.

We are thrilled to have received this recognition, and it highlights our commitment to providing exceptional services to our clients. The award was announced at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, and we are excited to share this news with our clients and partners. CACI will be present at Adobe Summit UK this June and we look forward to seeing you there. Please feel free to get in touch with us if you’d like to meet at the event.

David Sealey, Director of Strategy and Growth at CACI, said,

“Adobe’s solutions to deliver enhanced customer experiences are an essential part of our market offering. I’m delighted that this award recognizes the hard work of CACI’s commercial and delivery team as they implement, optimize, and support brands with Adobe. It’s also important to acknowledge the importance of our clients who have the vision and determination to deliver better experiences to their customers.”

CACI’s expertise with Adobe extends across Adobe Campaign, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and the Adobe Experience Platform. Our focus for 2023 and 2024 is to help organizations evolve their Adobe stack in pursuit of greater performance, reliability, and the ability to launch new use cases.

Should you wish to find out more about CACI’s services for Adobe products, please feel free to get in touch.

Braze’s Global Customer Engagement report will have brands rethinking customer experience

Posted on: 10 March 2023

In today’s competitive market, understanding how best to engage with your customers and reacting to their behaviours is critical to success.

Following the launch of Braze’s third instalment of the Global Customer Engagement report, I explored the three key customer engagement trends within the report. I also considered how brands impacted by these trends should respond to these familiar challenges.

CACI is an award-winning partner of Braze. We know consumers better than anyone else. Our breadth of demographic data combined with our expertise in marketing and data technology and campaign delivery makes us a key partner for brands looking to deliver innovative customer journeys.

Trend 1: Retention-focused strategies

The first trend identified in the report is how brands are increasingly focused on retention to combat the unsustainably high acquisition costs. The report highlights that brands increased their marketing budget on retention from 33% in 2020 to 45% in 2022. This enables marketers to invest in their customers and design solutions to keep them coming back to their brand.

The challenge is that a sub-optimal strategy can end up costing you time and money. A strong retention strategy delivering value to your customers is worth its weight in gold, as not only are acquisition costs high, retaining customers today is becoming increasingly harder with the breadth of touchpoints available for your competitors to interact with existing customers.

Identifying and combatting these behaviours while understanding how to add value throughout the customer lifecycle is vital. While Braze has a variety of channels and techniques that enable you to deliver your retention campaigns, the hard work happens outside of the platform.

To help brands develop the right strategy to maximise value, CACI’s CRM Strategy team are first focused on getting to the heart of what makes or breaks customers’ interest in your brand. We use our breadth of skills across customer data and campaign delivery to help develop and deliver award-winning retention strategies across a variety of sectors. We recognise that every strategy is different depending on your organisation’s needs, goals and customer behaviours. That is why we take the time to innately understand and ensure each strategy is bespoke to cover each of these areas.

Trend 2: Data management

The 2023 report highlighted two main data management challenges that we also see when working with brands:

Brands have too much data

The days of batch imports and overnight data loads for campaigning are slipping away, and real-time data is becoming increasingly prevalent. With more real-time touchpoints comes more data needing to be categorised, organised, refined and adapted.

This is where having a strong alignment between your tech stack components becomes crucial. The ability to process this data at speed and understand the quality of the data– not the quantity of the data– is paramount.

However, not all brands have an aligned tech stack suited to this influx of data. CACI’s Marketing Technology Solutions team help brands see the wood from the trees regarding their overall data architecture by delivering gap analyses that find and prioritise the gaps to plug.

We’ve recently completed an extensive Braze and architecture audit for a global retail brand which assessed four key areas: Architecture, Usage, Process and Data. The results of this have helped fuel this brand’s understanding of their existing data structure, what gaps are present and then supply a roadmap of priority actions across the next 6 months. This work will enhance the customer experience and deepen customer understanding.

There is a capability gap

The report is correct when it says: “Data management doesn’t end with technology—teams need to be set up to effectively use data.” Skills within CRM are ever-growing, and with more emphasis on data, there are desires to analyse this data immediately and understand how your brand can leverage this within the customer strategy.

Our Campaign Operations team enable and elevate brands daily to unlock key features of Braze such as Conversion Events and Funnel Reports to inform campaign performance. Beyond Braze, utilising the power of Currents has helped brands understand macro and micro campaign performances, resulting in changes to customer strategies and optimised test and learn processes.

Our team of Certified Braze Consultants are a blend of operationally and data-focused power users who bridge capability gaps by working with you to unlock the untapped potential of Braze. Additionally, the team supports our Data Scientists to identify micro customer behaviours that affect campaign performance.

Trend 3: Siloed teams

Like the capability gap, siloed teams can be incredibly detrimental and limiting to a brand’s CRM programme. According to the report, 16% to 28% of marketers in small to large scale companies reported that customer engagement was owned by either marketing in collaboration with other teams, or by cross-functional digital teams. Collaboration between Data, Tech and CRM has become increasingly vital to build out relevant testing strategies and evolve customer experiences.

The report explained that this is not just a regional or even an EMEA issue, but a global one. At CACI, we have the knowledge and tools to drive and manage successful transitions in a company to help increase adoption and enablement of new business processes and technology solutions. Our Operational Change consultants will work with a cross-functional team of experts in-house to create end-to-end solutions to real-life business problems.

How CACI can help

The Braze report provides an excellent overview of the challenges we are all facing in creating and executing effective customer engagement initiatives through the trends of retention-focused strategies, data management and siloed teams.

CACI can supply end-to-end support along the customer engagement journey and help turn observations into strategic and tactical solutions through our powerful combination of data and technology, ensuring customers remain at the heart of any engagement strategies.

To learn more about how CACI can support your business’ customer engagement strategies and initiatives, get in touch with our team of experts today.

Understanding the impact of ESG & sustainability on businesses

Posted on: 7 March 2023

What is ESG and why is it relevant?

ESG (environmental, social and governance) is a set of measures through which a business can assess its impact on the world. Alongside sustainability, these are factors that affect every consumer and therefore businesses alike, increasingly influencing how we think, behave, and live our lives. ESG and sustainability are quickly becoming the criteria on which businesses succeed or fail, especially as we look further into the future.

Why do businesses need to act on ESG & sustainability fast?

The Companies Act 2006 requires large and medium-sized companies to publish an annual strategic report which must include information on ESG-related items, such as the business’ environmental impact, employee disclosures, social, community, human rights issues, and the company’s policies on each. In addition, the UK passed the net zero emissions law¹ in 2019 targeting net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050. To reach that target, the government has pushed reporting requirements. As a result, consumers and businesses are increasingly looking to reduce any unsustainable processes and practices, which is increasingly influencing how we behave and how we live our lives.

As companies are recording their environmental impacts, individuals are becoming more aware of their own carbon footprints. In fact, 62% of the UK population² now believe that climate change is the biggest threat to civilisation. Social consciousness continues to grow as consumers make decisions on how businesses conduct themselves, and 36% of the UK³ claim that they try to only buy from companies that are seen as socially and environmentally compliant. Businesses are starting to understand that not only is acting in an ethical and sustainable manner not having a negative impact on business, but that it is a requirement to act in the positive.

So, how can CACI help businesses navigate consumer attitudes towards ESG and sustainability?

Using CACI’s ESG Score to support ESG & sustainability-driven businesses

CACI can help businesses make informed decisions to quantify and ultimately improve their carbon and social impact. The ESG Score can help businesses identify customers that are most concerned about ESG issues and support businesses in engaging with them regarding the brand’s products, prices and propositions.

CACI’s ESG Score also uncovers individual attitudes towards environmental issues, social equality and governance, and can be applied to an existing customer base to identify a business’ exposure as well as help them re-position for the future.

The resulting data helps to inform decision-making and decipher the impacts that carbon footprints have in various societal capacities and circumstances.

Carbon footprint of household + travel

A household’s carbon footprint is assessed based on household consumption – food, housing, transportation, clothing, and other personal services. It is an important contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Leveraging the depth of our unique consumer data, CACI can assess the type of property, mode of commute, consumption behaviour and more to estimate the carbon footprint of a household. Businesses can use his information to target the right households and areas with focused messaging to help reduce global carbon emissions.

Carbon Footprint of vehicles

CACI’s route optimisation software, Pin Routes, allows businesses to create routes for visits, deliveries or collections, ultimately reducing logistics costs and improving sustainability by reducing unnecessary driving. It now also allows businesses to understand the carbon emissions or carbon footprints associated with logistics operations. This in turn can be used to make informed decisions that can help with the move towards electric vehicles.

Carbon Footprint of marketing

There is a carbon cost for all marketing activity– even an email takes up space on servers and has a sunk carbon cost. CACI quantify the carbon impact of various channels, allowing our clients to undertake a full carbon impact assessment on all of their marketing activity and identify optimum channel mix to best balance campaign efficacy with carbon impact.

Social Impact Assessment

The provision of services across the UK is not equal, with some areas having much better access to civil services (e.g. healthcare, education or leisure centres) than others. CACI has quantified the accessibility to these services at postcode level and has identified areas that require additional support. The goal of impact assessment is to bring about a more ecologically, socio culturally and economically sustainable and equitable environment. By improving an area’s social provision, businesses can promote community development and empowerment, social cohesion, build capacity, and develop social capital (social networks and trust).

To learn more about how CACI can help your business improve its carbon and social impact, contact us today.

Sources:

Using machine learning techniques to increase revenue, conversions and engagement for DFS

Posted on: 20 February 2023

About DFS

DFS, the UK’s largest sofa retailer and manufacturer, aims to lead furniture retailing in the digital age. Most famous for sofas, DFS also partners with leading lifestyle brands, such as Dwell, French Connection and Joules, to provide a wider range of furniture products.

CACI has worked with DFS for over 20 years and hosts its customer database, providing insight from CACI’s proprietary datasets to support customer understanding and location strategy. Outputs include segmentation, machine learning models, communications strategy, store catchments and digital targeting algorithms.

The challenge: targeting relevant engagement between major purchases

DFS sells to a market where customers traditionally make infrequent, high value purchases, as Mike Aspinall, Data Activation Manager at DFS, explains: “The main thing we sell is sofas, with a repeat purchase average of seven years. This can be challenging for CRM, which is all about nurturing ongoing relationships.

Our challenge was to deliver a CRM strategy that would enable us to maintain relevant engagement in a targeted way. We wanted to understand the opportunity to encourage repeat purchase through a data lens – which customers might be open to further purchases, when they might be likely to make them, and what kind of products they might want.

The solution: an actionable scoring algorithm that updates continually

Mike asked CACI to work with a large sample of DFS’ previous purchase data. “We have a rich customer database. CACI analysed two years’ data to find people who had bought two items from us consecutively within that period, looking at their purchase patterns and pathways.

CACI mapped out the attributes of people who had made the two qualifying purchases using Ocean demographic and lifestyle data blended with DFS behavioural data. The analysis looked at the identified customers’ over and under-indexing attributes, comparing them to people who bought the first item but not the second.

CACI trained a machine learning algorithm which is updated daily, incorporating the latest transaction and customer information. It is applied to the data in DFS’ customer experience platform (CEP), appending data points to customer profiles.

The benefits: conversion and revenue uplifts through highly relevant, low-waste, accurately targeted multi-channel campaigns

Mike tells us, “we had fairly low expectations of the first email in a multi-month journey. But against the control group, we saw an 866% uplift in revenue from the email campaign alone, within 14 days. That’s a four-times conversion increase, measured against a control group of people in the same segment who didn’t receive the communication.

This project was a perfect fit for CACI as an expert data science partner. With our DFS mission to lead furniture retailing in the digital age, machine learning is crucial to engaging our customers with truly relevant, timely communications. We have been working with CACI for decades – their team understands our business and data extremely well and we have a strong relationship.

Read the full case study here. For more information on how CACI can support you in delivering targeted, relevant, customer experiences get in touch and one of our data experts will happily arrange a time to talk.

Elevating Customer Experience with High-Quality Data: The Power of DataHub

Posted on: 7 February 2023

“Garbage In, Garbage Out” (GIGO) is a well-known adage that holds true across various industries, including sports nutrition, education, wine making, data science, and, most notably, customer experience.

Poor-quality data can undermine confidence in reports and impede the implementation of personalisation and other data-driven initiatives.

At CACI, we are dedicated to harnessing the power of data to deliver remarkable results.

High-quality customer data is critical to this mission. Data that is accurate, consistent, and free from duplicates will enable us to optimise customer loyalty, personalisation, AI/ML, conversion optimization, and regulatory compliance.

To ensure that our data is of the highest quality, we adhere to the following criteria:

Demographically rich: The data provides insights into the customer’s identity and lifestyle.
Standardized: The data is consistent across systems, allowing for quick and efficient processing.
Veracity: The data adheres to your standards for validity and consistency.
Free of duplicates: The data is resolved at the individual level to avoid double counting and over-communication.
Consistent identifier: The customer is identified consistently, regardless of the source.
Predictive: The data contains variables that enable modelling and prediction of customer interests and needs.
Compliant: The data adheres to relevant consent and permissions standards.
Understood within the organization: The data is accessible and understandable to stakeholders.

To address these challenges, CACI has developed DataHub, a solution that solves data quality issues faced by brands. DataHub was built on the experience of working with leading brands in retail, publishing, financial services, gaming, and utilities.

It processes and enriches data in real-time using a scale on demand cloud native architecture, engineered to work with your data, wherever it is stored. For CACI clients already using Acorn, Ocean, and Fresco, DataHub provides dynamic, real-time enrichment of data, enabling real-time personalization and optimization of the digital or call center experience.

To learn more about DataHub and its flexible integration options for all use cases and enterprise architecture needs, download our short brochure or reach out to us for more information.

Let’s work towards a future where data quality is no longer a concern.

Creating a transformational MarTech Stack

Posted on: 7 December 2022

I had the recent pleasure of joining Matt McRoberts (Braze) and Rob Murphy (mParticle) on a panel at Braze Forge in London. We lent into a topic that is high-up the priority list for those working in experience, product, and marketing roles – “how do we create a transformational MarTech stack?”

With MarTech (technology for marketing and advertising usage) becoming a core capability for delivering enhanced customer experiences, the MarTech we have (or lack) can be a major blocker to progress. An email provider that can’t handle real-time messaging, an advertising tool that doesn’t have sight of first-party data, and insight tools that can’t analyse the customer’s journey.

I wanted to share a few takeaways from the panel that will hopefully help you in your MarTech transformation:

1. Are you truly aiming for transformation?

Recent research that Braze and CACI conducted found that whilst 86% of financial services firms believed they were delivering a great experience, only 40% of customers agreed. This disparity is at the heart of the question of whether brands know what it takes to deliver a transformed experience.

Areas to focus on:

Audit your current communications to understand where you are now
Segment your market and gather customer feedback to understand what your customers would consider transformational
Design future customer journeys that express what a transformed experience looks like

2. Transformational MarTech stacks become digital nervous systems

With a promised 12x improvement in conversion rates for action-based comms vs batch comms, the ability to listen, predict and react is a critical core capability. Yet too many marketing teams are hamstrung not just by slow data integrations, but also by outdated campaigning processes requiring them to write briefs down and submit them to be processed.

The digital nervous system is constantly listening and capable of reacting immediately to inbound triggers or predictions.

Areas to focus on:

Review your existing MarTech architecture to understand blockers, siloes and bottlenecks
Map out your operating model, to understand what would need to change in order to deliver more real-time automated comms

3. Politics and rigidity are the enemies of transformation

Looking around the audience at Braze Forge, there were experienced marketers who wanted to be delivering better comms experiences. There was no challenge to the ideals of real-time personalised experience being superior drivers of improved short-term and long-term results.

Despite the shared ambition, I see many brands being held back by politics and rigidity. Politics meaning the control, authority, and power to make good decisions. And rigidity being the inability to act at pace.

Therefore, the ideal MarTech leader needs to demonstrate the ability to develop consensus and buy-in for transformational plans. To not only have a vision, but to communicate it and drive it through a business.

Areas to focus on:

Build a clearly phased roadmap for change and continually communicate it
Create a solid business plan to justify the roadmap that you need to deliver
Get close to those that can stop your roadmap, often the power lies with those who can prevent rather than fund (think enterprise architects, procurement, and security)

4. Agile working and incremental performance increases are your change enablers

There’s an old quote that the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. What the quote doesn’t say is that the first bite will be the first of many, and that you can expect to be chewing and biting for a long time. Agile delivery of change gives the chance to handle large scale transformation one bite at a time.

This approach is worth the effort having seen it work at Legal & General and Domino’s where impressive results have followed incremental changes. In the case of Domino’s this was to drive ruthless relevancy in comms. For Legal & General it is an ongoing process of releasing high value use cases to prove a business case before moving to the next.

Areas to focus on:

As part of the transformation roadmap have clear success measures and unlock funding and buy-in round by round
Seek to prove value through optimisation before wholesale change
Work with a trusted agency partner to launch minimal viable products (MVPs) which prove that use cases work

CACI’s Framework for Value Focussed Transformation

When it comes to delivering change in organisations, we’ve reviewed successful programmes of work to develop our framework. This defines the planning process we go through when evaluating how to have an impact on any size of organisation.

We’re always welcoming brands with transformational aspirations to talk with us. Get in touch if you’re leaning into a programme of change.