Case Study: Norths Collective sharpens 360 customer view

Norths Collective has boosted membership and user engagement by building out personalisation and analytics under its focused 360 customer view.

Robert Lopez, chief marketing and innovation officer at Norths Collective said the company was able to achieve this, partly by creating a single view of the customer.

“We always had this core issue, whereby we had so many siloed data points, we really couldn't obtain a full 360-degree view of our vendors and for us that caused a number of problems.

“We couldn't market effectively. We couldn't make educated business decisions and use strong BI tools and we just couldn't get that single view of the customer,” Lopez said.

He added that for the business the “real core objective is being able to connect these siloed data points into one single source of customer truth.”

The team were able were able to connect “around 11 siloed data points connected through Boomi to create a single source of customer truth.”

Lopez said its centralised view has already generated tangible results.

“When I look at it from a marketing lens, our capabilities now, just by having that single source of truth, are astronomical compared to prior.

“I look at our engagement metrics from an email perspective, our open rates have gone up from [roughly] 23 percent to about 62 percent across the group.”

Lopez said since Norths Collective are now able to hyper-personalise communications, click through rates have risen from 1. 4 percent to 11. 9 percent.

“Our unsubscribe rate has dropped from 1. 4 percent to 0. 4 percent, a whole percentage point drop.

“We see more engagement in our venues for our members. When our members are engaging with our business, it means we can give more back to the community. We give back around $1. 8 million a year.

“That number has grown 13 percent since the start of the digital transformation journey.”

Lopez said across the year, the business will be focused on improving its agility and updating its current Boomi integration connectors with its third-parties to “bring in as much real-time data as we can”.

“We want to be a company that's agile and able to pivot as needed. We're working with our partners to ensure that the data that's coming through is locked live within a 15-minute increment.

“That gives our team the confidence that the data they're looking at is accurate and timely as well.”

He also explained data and ethics play a massive role in its overall transformation.

“This is a data transformation journey, just as much as it is a digital transformation journey and I like to always emphasise that whenever we talk about data the first thing that comes to mind is the ethical use of data.

“No matter what you're doing, if your company is handling, collecting, maintaining, storing, using data, they need to have some form of an ethical lens approach to what they're doing and we did bring an ethical lens approach to what we did with our integrations.”

He said with data points connecting together, “we wanted to make sure that how we were using that data, we were handling it ethically.”

Lopez added the company plans to release its own ethical personalisation policy, he adds is a “bit unique in the Australian landscape”.

“It's sort of been spoken about over in the US, but this is a four-page document that will explain quite openly to our members and our community how we collect, how we use, how we store their data and how we use that data to personalise their communications,” Lopez said.

He explained one example of the four pillars of vertical personalisation talked is in the document is customisation based on behavioural data as opposed to personal or physical attributes.

“We don't solely look at somebody's gender or age or postcode. We use the behavioural data. The fact that they purchase a hamburger or a salad or a schnitzel to make sure the messaging is relevant to those particular community members.”

From its work, Norths Collective has seen a membership growth rate of roughly 21 percent, which he adds is “one of the key metrics and measures of success”.

Norths Collective's renewal rates have also increase by 28 percent.

“We've seen customer lifetime value increase by around 23 percent since the start of this journey, and that's an important one because it means that members are visiting more frequently and increasing their spend per visit as well.

“We've definitely seen some strong engagement in our app, which is built on Heroku, which uses the power of a single source of data and integrated with our salesforce.”

He said from the this, the organisation has seen around a 54 percent increase in visitations from the groups that have engaged within the gamification within the app.

With two major projects underway this year, Lopez said all its work traces back to its single source of truth ideals.

The first project entails bringing the call centre into the Salesforce ecosystem and developing out its single source of customer truth with Boomi.

“Along with this new generative AI within the Salesforce service cloud ecosystem, it's going to give our call centre attendants, so much more power on every phone call.

“When somebody rings, as long as they're in our database, either as a member or even as a lead, it'll pop up information and what we have on that customer and it'll even bring in engagement data.”

“We'll know if they've recently been on our website, what content they've looked at through Salesforce for personalisation and then we use generative AI to allow us to understand in a few sentences, a bit of a summary on who this member is.”

Lopez added, “BI is an offshoot of that and we're implementing Tableau, which will overtake our existing CRM analytics product and it's going to give us and our wider team a lot more power with the data we have.”