Capability: Customer Insight
In our latest Cost of Living Podcast, we examine how expectations around missing payments are doubled among the least affluent demographic category in the coming months, with concerns around paying utility bills affecting nearly one in five households within the Low-Income Living category.
How we drew these conclusions using our Cost of Living survey
CACI’s recurrent Cost of Living survey has revealed particular concern among this group, who cite their likelihood to miss payments on rent, council tax and utility bills as impacts of the rising cost of living. Where 11% of the UK population fear missing payments on utility bills in the coming months, that figure rises to 18% among those households with the lowest incomes. Unlike other demographic groups, this figure outranks their expectations of going overdrawn or using credit cards to fund or defer payments.
Every three months, we ask a nationally representative sample of 2,000 UK adults a series of themed questions around the Cost of Living, their challenges, plans, behaviours and expectations. CACI has been conducting this research since the height of the Covid pandemic, establishing a series of trackers that monitor feelings towards the Cost of Living, the impacts this is having and how their activities are changing. At CACI, we utilise the power of our demographic segmentation, Acorn, to inform brands about how these changes will influence the way consumers are behaving.
Cost of Living Podcast – Part One: How consumers are reacting & adapting to living costs
Part one of our special two-part podcast focuses on the latest changes in sentiment around living costs, the rising use of foodbanks and how Gen Z have been able to avoid cost-cutting measures on the scale as the older generations. Our hosts, Paul Langston and Hannah Smith, react to the findings, including how housing situations may develop as tenants in particular become priced out of their current rentals.
Cost of Living Podcast – Part Two: Impact of living costs on mental health, travel & brand orientation
Part two moves on to consider the knock-on impacts of the continued strain on mental health, changes to the way that we are taking holidays and how consumers are turning to brands to lead on Net Zero goals.
If you’d like to find out more or subscribe to our monthly podcast and receive all of our Cost of Living analysis as it’s published, you can sign-up here.
What makes a place ‘perfectly balanced’?
Only 1.5% of locations across the UK can be described as balanced across all pillars. We set out to find these locations and determine what sets them apart in our report, “Six Pillars of Success: Building Resilient Places”, where we explored locations across the UK that are “balanced” in all six of CACI’s property pillars that contribute to the resilience of both community and place. Over 5,000 locations across the UK were assessed in this report, of which only 77 were considered balanced across all pillars.
Interestingly, only 1 in 20 regional towns in the UK are balanced. This demonstrates that despite achieving perfect balance in some places, there is still a lot that can be done for places to enhance their community engagement.
In this blog series, we’ll uncover the defining criteria for ‘perfectly balanced’ places and find out how these communities’ tactics can be applied to other locations across the UK.
Pillar 1: Representation & proper sizing of independent & chain retailers
Having retailers that ensure a return on investment for occupiers and effectively appeal to locals’ needs along with proper leasing of a retailer in terms of its tenant line-up are critical to an area’s success. A ‘perfectly balanced’ place achieves a balance between chain retailers to boutique shops and independent retailers by understanding the core of their community’s personalities and values and reflecting that in the area’s retailers.
Pillar 2: Uniquely tailored offline experiences
Unique offline experiences are ones that are only available in person and cannot be replicated at home. A place that is ‘perfectly balanced’ will host things to see and do for customers to do in person that come with halo benefits and contribute to the overall liveliness of the area and can only be experienced in person. The results will be achieved through an uptake of dwell time, varied footfall patterns, greater customer spending and more.
Pillar 3: Engaging community infrastructure
The types of amenities and services offered in an area can play a vital role in enhancing social value and community engagement. A ‘perfectly balanced’ place has optimised its relationship between supply and demand across amenities to help commercial landlords plug gaps within the community and reinforce social value.
Pillar 4: Support social cohesion through optimised residential design
A lack of suitable housing can be damaging for an area. ‘Perfectly balanced’ places optimise their residential design to positively influence the community and create long-term value, income and footfall for developers. These places typically feature residential units that closely align with the needs of the community and offer the right types, tenures, sizes and price points to fill supply gaps
Pillar 5: Sufficient & accessible work opportunities for the local population
Communities need job opportunities for those looking for employment. Acute un- and under-employment can be damaging on both an individual and community-wide basis. In our post-pandemic world, 29% of the UK population work in hybrid roles, allowing them the option of splitting their work week between the office and home. A ‘perfectly balanced’ place offers working opportunities that reflect the demand levels of the area and increasingly include collaborative, co-working spaces.
Pillar 6: Appealing open spaces for the community to dwell in
To drive footfall to a location, a ‘perfectly balanced’ place draws people into spending their leisure time there. It will be conveniently located, offer appealing services and amenities and encourage dwelling and exploring. With an increased interest in greening urban environments and finding pockets of greenery in even the most unexpected spots, ‘perfectly balanced’ places will offer luscious open spaces that are built sustainably and encourage biodiversity and carbon capture.
Stay tuned for our upcoming blog featuring the first two of our top five ‘perfectly balanced’ places to live.
To learn how our six property pillars can help ensure you are creating resilient places, please speak to one of our Placemaking and Property experts.
The challenge
- Increase the proportion of journeys made by active travel and public transport
- Understand variations in the customer profile across different modes of travel, and specific Bus, Metrolink, and cycle routes
- Understand barriers to take-up for different user groups (e.g. geographic location, affordability)
- Identify appropriate ways to engage with existing customers and target new users
The solution
To overcome these challenges, Transport for Greater Manchester partnered with CACI on the following solutions:
- Use Acorn Postcode, Workforce Acorn, Paycheck, and Retail Footprint to enhance their own datasets, including survey data (at the sampling, weighting and analysis stages)
- Use with GIS systems to identify spatial patterns and trends
- Postcode-level analysis provides a granular understanding that allows for targeted intervention
The benefits
“CACI’s Acorn, Acorn knowledge base and supporting products (Paycheck, Retail Footprint), used in combination with our own datasets, increase the value we can get from our data and help us to understand in more depth the people behind the travel patterns.”
Rosalind O’Driscoll, Head of Policy Insight and Public Affairs – Transport for Greater Manchester
Read the case study
You can access and download the full case study here. If you have any questions or want to learn more about CACI’s solutions, please get in touch with us.
On 20 July, the Social Housing Regulation Act received Royal Assent to become law. This places the social housing sector under increased scrutiny and introduces wide-ranging implications for how housing associations operate. The Act will:
- Hold social housing providers responsible for new consumer standards, empowering tenants to provide the regulator stronger powers to hold landlords accountable.
- Offer powers to the regulator to issue unlimited fines to rogue social landlords, creating a new risk for housing associations to manage customer engagement.
- Enforce a closer working relationship between the ombudsman and the regulator. The ombudsman has emphasised the need for improved knowledge and information management across the sector and can enforce its recommendations more effectively through significant fines.
What transformational changes will housing associations need to consider implementing?
Housing Associations have several operational touchpoints with customers, ranging from complaints, repairs, arrears teams and beyond. This means that data and information are siloed across housing associations, prohibiting organisations from effectively engaging with customers or meeting their needs and falling foul to the new laws.
Housing associations will need to improve data quality across customers and assets to meet these new standards set by the regulator and avoid fines. A complete, up-to-date and actionable view of customers will be essential to effectively engage with them.
How can CACI help?
CACI can support on these key first steps for housing associations. Our work with housing associations has revealed that they are experiencing issues across the board with siloed data, gaps in customer data and complications with data foundations.
CACI can drive value for housing associations and help them become compliant with new regulations through various methods of support, including:
- Assessing risks, reviewing and transforming data management in line with Knowledge and Information Management: We provide the data foundations in line with new regulations and recommendations to reduce your data risks and conduct thorough data quality and architecture assessments to do so.
- Recommending technology and data roadmaps: We offer insight into the best platforms, the processes needed to adapt to support data quality initiatives for your housing association to manage data and drive value across the organisation. This will help you achieve a single, unified view of residents in the community.
- Understanding customers and assets: Our wealth of consumer and asset data supplies deeper insight into customers’ demographic, vulnerability and lifestyle variables, while asset and place-based data enhance your understanding of your homes and community.
- Activating actionable and accurate insights: Tailor your propositions and engagement by building a profile of customers according to key organisational issues such as complaints and arrears. Our trusted asset and consumer insights will help you offer the right services to the right people, reducing cost and resources while supporting your customers.
- Driving value to improve customer satisfaction: An embedded data strategy that will improve outcomes for your customers by harnessing the power of analyses and spatial platforms.
What’s next?
CACI will be leading roundtables for housing associations to discuss approaches and best practices for data quality and insights. These sessions will offer a platform to share challenges and resources on meeting the new standards to ensure that housing associations deliver more value and improved outcomes for customers.
Please reach out to Tom Clarke or Gina Bryden for further information.
Background:
This prominent global apparel and home goods retailer, with decades in operation and hundreds of stores in the UK, Europe and worldwide, was seeking new site locations to bolster their European planning strategy. They quickly realised that they would need to gain access to secure and reliable data in order to better understand their customer demographic profiles to inform their location planning strategy and optimise their store network.
Challenge:
The ability to leverage precise data would help the business combat several challenges, including:
- Accurately predicting core and secondary catchments for new site locations
- Building up a profile of customers in the business’ existing catchments
- Identifying gaps in the market, even with a high amount of existing coverage
- Exploring new markets and determining the suitability of new site locations
Solution:
With a necessity of acquiring robust data that would support an initial estate strategy for the UK, the retailer chose to licence Acorn and Retail Market data. Their reliability and comprehensive coverage of the UK, high levels of detail across population profiles that supply detailed insights into new site locations, the confidence of working with a provider that would provide accurate and up-to-date sociodemographic data and the ongoing support and consultancy that CACI would provide along the way made the licencing decision an easy one.
Acorn’s breakdown of each postcode sector highly supported catchment planning by supplying innate insight into the demographics of the population within the business’ predicted catchments. It allowed the business to generate catchments and choropleth maps showing the distribution of people in varying Acorn groups. This enhanced their understanding of the affluence and economic activity of larger areas and in detail at postcode sector level.
Retail Markets data also helped the business understand the shopping population rather than just the population of the town. This indicated how large the catchment areas should be and how far people would travel to visit certain shopping destinations. It also provided a ranking and index value to illustrate the popularity and competition amongst various shopping and retail parks across Europe.
Results:
- Through CACI’s data and consultancy, the business successfully planned for their European store openings. The geodemographic data providing in-depth insight used for board report presentations to get sign-off on new stores.
- The business’ access to Retail Markets data continues to support their growth and their ability to identify any gaps in the market.
Outcomes/Future:
The retailer is keen to continue partnering with CACI to ensure ongoing success with their European operation plans. They are confident that CACI will help them further explore new markets as they continue to grow, and that CACI will continue to review and support any necessary strategic adaptations as technology and the retail market evolve.
For more information, get in touch and one of our data experts will happily arrange a time to talk.
Background
Nansledan is a new community being built on the eastern edge of the coastal town of Newquay in Cornwall, England. Over the last decade, the Duchy of Cornwall has acted as master developer and landowner of the development, creating an already vibrant community which will eventually include c4,000 homes, job opportunities and diversification of the local economy to sustainably meet Newquay’s current and future needs.
To bring the vision of a successful and thriving new community to life, the masterplan for Nansledan includes a new town centre, known to the Duchy of Cornwall as “Market Street”. To facilitate the progress an introduction was therefore made to CACI, to demonstrate the breadth of data and consultancy expertise that could be offered to support the forward strategy of Market Street.
The Challenge
To answer questions around the scale and mix of spaces within the Market Street plans, it was clear that data-driven insights would also be helpful in shaping the forward strategy.
The Duchy of Cornwall also wanted to understand what role Nansledan might play within the wider Cornish market and how complementary offers could be provided so as not to compete with Truro, Newquay and Padstow.
The Solution
CACI’s initial report has now been completed and was presented to the Duchy of Cornwall in February 2023. It has already been helpful in shaping the forward strategy for the first phase of Market Street and will continue to inform the scale and the mix of space that comes forward across Market Street and Nansledan over the coming years.
The Duchy of Cornwall now has a much clearer understanding of Nansledan’s catchment area from both a resident and tourist perspective around demographics, spending habits and spending potential. In turn, this is expected to help in the positioning of Market Street within its local and regional market and will hopefully assist with ensuring its long-term commercial success.
The Future
While Market Street is yet to be developed, the work undertaken by CACI so far has helped to shape the Duchy of Cornwall’s forward strategy and will continue to feed into the design of the remaining phases of Market Street, as well as other commercial centres that were planned across Nansledan.
Further advice is expected as the development progresses and wider market influences take shape in order for the Duchy of Cornwall to continue to position Market Street appropriately for Nansledan’s growing population, as well as that of other local towns and villages. Using data-led insights on an ongoing basis is seen as increasingly important given the wider context of struggling retail centres around the country and in trying to ensure a vibrant and thriving centre at Nansledan.
Read the full customer story here. For more information on how our data and solutions can support your business growth please get in touch with us.
How is Consumer Duty compliance affecting client communications?
Consumer Duty is rapidly changing the way Financial Services businesses communicate with clients. It is also causing consumers to re-evaluate the value of advice they receive from financial service advisers, and how financial institutions segment clients and offer relevant products and services.
On 30 April 2023, the UK adopted the new Consumer Duty obligations, and financial service providers and firms concluded their review of their existing open products. The changes that Consumer Duty brings impacts the way financial service providers interact with new and existing clients. Therefore, it is now more important than ever to ensure that you and your business are equipped with rich, actionable insights into your customers, to help you understand where to focus your Consumer Duty activities to ensure compliance.
What are the most impactful challenges currently resulting from Consumer Duty compliance?
- Solidifying customer communications. You must show that the essential steps to understand customers’ needs and improve communications are being taken to remain compliant.
- Identifying and supporting vulnerable customers. Vulnerability indicators change over time, therefore, without adequate customer knowledge, determining the diverse needs of your customers will be difficult.
- Lack of strategy for maintaining and nurturing customer relationships over their policy, resulting from limitations of technical debt and data capabilities.
- Inability to provide relevant offers or leverage existing customers to attract new customers when you do not know who your customers are.
- Future proofing your business becomes compromised without the insights to initiate transformational change. Your brand will need to remain relevant for customers and adhere to their customer experience expectations.
The steps CACI takes to make a difference for your business
We support Consumer Duty compliance across several key requirements, including:
- Supplying support beyond the strategy – understanding customers and improving communications.
- Developing a testing process to help you understand your customers and find areas for improvement.
- Accelerating Consumer Duty delivery and showing progress through an innate understanding of your customers’ diverse needs.
- Providing a comprehensive view of all customer communications, assessed for suitability against Consumer Duty and amended as needed.
- Scoring and evaluating your performance against key Consumer Duty metrics.
- Bringing in all channels to support customers.
Our process guarantees that you will be solving Consumer Duty compliance issues as they arise to secure a successful future for your business. We break this down into four steps:
1. Audit:
We work with you to gain an understanding of your existing communications, technical capabilities and data available, for communications improvements to be made effectively.
2. Campaign strategy, testing & delivery:
We then identify initial tests to show iterative improvement and implementation of the defined methods of communication that will meet Consumer Duty standards.
3. Customer strategy:
We create robust segmentation to define where there is headroom opportunity and who your priority audiences are. We also define the customer journey to activate your segmentation and strategy accordingly.
4. Contact strategies & use cases:
Finally, we develop detailed contact strategies for the execution of your customer journey, and identify technology and data use cases that will inform your future architecture and technology roadmaps.
How CACI ensures your business meets Consumer Duty compliance: real-time example
When one business with a range of financial products that fall under Consumer Duty recognised that they did not have an established amount of internal experience, they approached CACI to ensure that Consumer Duty compliance was addressed with each of their products, tailored to the customer audiences they served.
We highlighted several opportunities that the business could leverage through our capabilities, including:
- Understanding the business’ customer base and identifying headroom opportunities to drive growth.
- Creating engagement strategies that would protect and support their customers throughout their relationship.
- Rapidly improving insight led capability by enriching, leveraging and harnessing their potential of customer data.
- Demonstrating the power that a 360° view of the business’ customers and market would have by blending their data with our own to analyse customers, identify opportunities and learn how they could serve customers more compliantly and effectively.
Why you can count on us to support your Consumer Duty compliance initiatives
Our extensive experience with Consumer Duty paired with our unique data capabilities allows us to define market opportunities and key audiences that will deliver immediate growth and engage audiences of the future. We translate rich, quantified insights into actionable strategies to deliver targeted, personalised and omnichannel programmes that will guarantee success.
Contact us today to find out how we can support you and your business ahead of the upcoming Consumer Duty deadline.
Background
Since 1964 Amtico have been one of the worlds leading designers and manufacturers in luxury flooring, and flooring solutions amongst both the residential and commercial flooring market. Amtico currently have a presence in over 600 independent stores in the UK.
The challenge
- Identifying the most viable locations for retailer recruitment, taking into account the demographic profiles that each retailer serves
- Having a rich insight into the overall market potential of each Amtico retailer
- Understanding and being able to map their target consumers across the UK
The Solution
- Investing in InSite enables Amtico to prioritise retailer acquisitions based on the greatest headroom potential whilst leveraging demographic data
- InSite enables Amtico to quantify their market potential based on the demographics of their consumers
- An actionable and strategic tool that Amtico are able to share with multiple stakeholders across the business
Read the full customer story here. For more information on how our data and solutions can support your business growth please get in touch with us.
It is now crucial for wealth managers and financial service firms to better their consumer understanding. They can do so by ensuring they are well-versed in the entire consumer lifecycle and journey, understand optimal communication techniques required for effective customer marketing, collect enriching customer-centric data to tailor marketing and distribution effectively, and establish innovative ways of measuring these areas to remain compliant.
Access to insightful demographics on the lifestyles, attitudes and behaviours of investors within the market can help drive improved distribution performance, revenue growth and increased client engagement. This crucial investment market knowledge can be provided by CACI.
How does CACI support a firm’s wealth management customer journey?
Through a detailed understanding of current investor behaviour needs and growth opportunities, CACI can support businesses by quantifying acquisition opportunities across regions to inform effective growth and investor engagement strategies.
Once businesses have been equipped with the appropriate datasets to target high net worth individuals (HNWI), CACI can support the optimisation of marketing performance across channels and help businesses improve their distribution performance through digital, direct and intermediated channels to drive improved marketing return on investment, increased customer acquisition and better investment retention performance.
CACI offer a range of support for wealth managers and firms to meet customers’ needs while ensuring compliancy, including:
- Support in better understanding existing investors.
- Understanding the market and identifying opportunities, particularly in identifying how and where to acquire HNWI.
- Determining where potential and current customers are located, as well as their value.
- Receiving demographic data and behavioural insights on investors to better understand the customer landscape.
- Demonstrating compliance with Consumer Duty, with meeting customers’ needs remaining at the heart of what CACI do.
How CACI use data science & analytics to support the wealth management customer journey
CACI’s data science & analytics services have three primary capacities to support the enhancement of the customer journey:
- Using pre-existing information on younger investors in wealth managers and firms’ portfolios to build bespoke datasets. CACI’s multi-sector knowledge and access to unique lifestyle datasets enables the building of this bespoke consumer data insight, providing wealth managers and firms with a detailed picture of the opinions, preferences and spending potential of HNWI.
- Modelling prospects for HNWI based on demographics.
- Assessing firms’ historic data to determine how HNWI already in their portfolio achieved this position by tracking their movements and identifying signals and triggers, to enable modelling of future investors.
CACI’s wealth management customer journey support: real-time examples
How CACI’s Fresco solution supported one business’ customer acquisition & marketing strategy
CACI’s Fresco solution was employed at one business to establish a granular understanding of existing investors. This allowed for the development of a targeting propensity score, which enabled the pinpointing of potential investors that would be most likely to join the business. CACI then identified and mapped opportunities across the UK, considering regional differences and high value areas to target. Detailed insight into prospects supported the development of a consistent marketing targeting strategy within the business, which was also rolled out across traditional and social media.
Results:
- Development of a targeted audience strategy focusing on high propensity and high value audiences.
- Reduction in digital marketing spend.
- Increase in digital marketing ROI (return on investment).
How investor segmentation, personas & geographic data application transformed a business
CACI developed investor segmentation, detailed personas and geographic counts to support a market sizing initiative requested by one client.
The resulting data uncovered hundreds of variables at an individual level and provided rich insight into a range of traits and characteristics. This not only supported the business’ understanding of its current customers, but of the wider UK investment market. CACI developed personas to help the business gauge an in-depth view into consumer behaviour, insight into the market and the potential reach for key segments. Finally, geographic mapping helped the business understand acquisition and growth potential across catchments and regions, and cross-sell models were developed to support the immediate activation of distribution and marketing activity.
Results:
- The business experienced steady and sustainable growth in its acquisition, retention and reactivation.
- Increased investment values were received from both new and existing investors.
- The business was equipped with actionable insights to help inform ongoing and future marketing and office location strategies.
Throughout this blog series for the wealth management industry, we break down the opportunities for businesses to attract and retain high-net-worth individuals. Continue reading at the links below:
Blog 1 – Four barriers wealth managers face when attracting & retaining customers
Blog 2 – How to identify, attract & retain high net worth individuals
Blog 3 – Three reasons why wealth & asset managers need young investors
Whitepaper – Acquiring new high net worth clients – What wealth managers need to know
To find out more about how CACI can support your wealth management customer journey, contact our team of data experts today.