Perrys transforms analytical capabilities with Dot Collective

About Perrys

With over 50 branches across the UK operating as official franchised dealers for manufacturers such as Ford, Kia, Citroen, Mazda and Vauxhall, Perrys Motor Group have been a staple in the British Motor Trade since the early 20th century.

As a well-established organisation with operations in new and used and commercial vehicles, there are a lot of moving parts with dependencies that have grown over time as the company continued to expand. Perrys worked with Dot Collective to combine its data into a single unified location and unlock underlying value in its data.

Challenges

Perrys marketing department were keen to enhance their analytical capabilities, putting data at the core of its operations and to use data-driven insight to drive relevant communications with their customers. One of the main challenges was how data was stored across different systems; all siloed from each other making it difficult to make informed decisions due to a lack of, or conflicting, information.

Their team were working around this structure to generate the reports and insights they needed by manually exporting data from each system and joining them together on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. Working in this way got the job done, but there were several areas of concern that Perrys wanted to address:

• The amount of time being spent by the team members exporting and joining data together.
• The accuracy of joined data given the difference in the data between systems.
• Complexity of making changes to a report and sharing the outputs with key stakeholders.
• Limited internal technical resources to build and maintain a data warehouse and the associated reporting capabilities.

Perrys were looking for ways in which they could streamline their data structure, empowering their teams and enabling them to focus on their core roles of delivering insights, identifying new segments of customers and confidently build effective campaigns – all without having to build and maintain complex new technical infrastructure.

Objectives

1. Centralise data: Consolidate cross system data and provide governed access to the central data store.
2. Self-service analytics: Provide accessible data views to empower teams to build their own data insights.
3. Better customer understanding: Gain granular behavioural insights of the entire customer base.
4. Automate repetitive tasks: Increase data analysis capability and insight focus, by reducing data wrangling overheads.

Solution

Using Dot Collective’s proprietary build accelerator, Perrys now have all their marketing data in one place readily available forthe marketing team to confidently explore, build reportsand define customer segments without having to first wrangle data from several exports.

By bringing key data sources under one roof, Perrys now have a level of visibility of their customers which was previously unattainable while simultaneously unlocking deeper analytical capabilities.

Fully managed data warehouse

Given the size of the Perrys Group and the volume of data generated daily, the data covering how consumers interact and transact with Perrys was far too broken up into many parts across multiple, unlinked systems.

Each system served its purpose well when looked at in isolation, but when trying to link data to get the full picture, either at a top-level campaign view or at an individual user journey level, it was a difficult and time-consuming task to get the data in the right shape to start presenting meaningful insights.

Contacts and enquiries were in one place, transactions in another and different elements of a consumers purchase in yet more disparate systems. The siloed structure and the cyclical nature of vehicle purchases meant duplicated records for customers were often created leading to a high volume of poor-quality data.

Through an advanced matching process that accounts for natural and non-natural variances in the data, Dot Collective created a single customer profile incorporating the data from all Perrys’ key systems into a unified record, putting all the information in a fully managed data warehouse which can be accessed by the Perrys team without having to spend time pulling data from different sources.

All relevant historical data was synced in line with data protection regulations to provide a view into past performance and establish a solid data set from which to create profiles on existing customers. Combined with a daily feed of new data, the data platform continually matches new data to existing customer profiles eliminating duplicate records, ensuring a reliable centralised data set.

Access to the same data for all teams

A major benefit of having a centralised location for data is that multiple teams, or even members of the same team, can all work from the same data. This means there won’t be any conflicting views as a result of one team having, or not having, access to a specific data source. As the data platform takes care of all the schema management and structuring of the data, there is no user input required from Perrys to maintain the dataset once it’s in the data platform.

Any team member at Perrys can have permission-based access to the data; whether that be for self-service analytics within the UI, to download a clean set of data to use in another application, or to build a dashboard to share with senior team members. The structure and nature of the data platform allows flexibility for users to maximise the value of the data they have and to focus on delivering insights.

Deeper customer insight and segmentation

Perrys created a range of customer segments such as “customers whose finance plan is coming up to expiry” and “customers who are due a service”, to group customers who are at a similar point in their sales journey together. Without a centralised location with all the data, getting answers to these questions would normally take several hours of moving data – with the new data platform, the answers are always available and updated daily.

Not only can Perrys see the volume of customers falling into a segment, but they can also drill down into a segment to see row level detail of individual records for customer information, transactions, and interactions.

It’s important for the marketing department to have visibility of all parts of the consumers purchase and ownership journey, alongside their route into the business from an attribution and marketing effectiveness perspective. Perrys can now see this entire process and explore all the data to start making informed data-driven decisions for future activities.

Results

Perrys centralised their data and maximised the value of the data without having to spend many hours each week manually exporting, deduplicating, reformatting and piecing data together. Perrys now have endless options in terms of what data and insights they can see, how they see it, and how they can start maximising its value – whether that be to provide strategic insight or to power marketing activities.

The impact in the marketing department has been transformational and continues to improve as the team gets accustomed to having this level of visibility of their data.

"The data platform is a fundamental tool across all areas of the department that powers both BAU marketing activities, as well as providing the data to power insight enabling us to make more informed decisions around cost effectiveness, ROI and performance optimisation."

Louise Bradbury
Head of Customer and Digital Marketing

The value of the data platform is not bound to just the marketing department but across the entire Perrys Group. A key element of Perrys’ business strategy is to develop better visibility around marketing investment, customer journey, and customer value; these principles touch every part of the business – from marketing and sales to finance and insurance. With the level of insight the platform delivers, there is scope to expand the range of ingested data to incorporate key data from other departments, creating a true unified single source of truth, maximising the value of the data held within the group.

See how Dot Collective can create the springboard for momentous organisational leaps with your data. Get in touch.