The Right Customer Data Boosts Sales and Marketing Effectiveness

Just like any other online retailer, HPshopping.com has one major benefit over traditional retailers: Every move the customer makes is recorded. "We know exactly where every customer is looking in our store," says Nikhil Behl, vice president of strategy and development of the e-commerce arm of Hewlett-Packard. "It's as if a traditional retailer could track every item a customer looks at as he walks down the aisle." But how does a retailer turn this vast amount of customer data into cost savings and sales opportunities? For HPshopping.com, that's where Informatica came into the picture, Behl says. "We needed a solution that could fit into our heterogeneous environment and grow with us," Behl explains, noting that the company is using several different applications to run its business. Behl says that Informatica's analytics solution gives HPshopping.com deep visibility into the effectiveness of promotions and other sales activity, as well as the ability to quickly act on anything that may cause sales to drop. "When deviations in the sales levels take place, I can easily see what I need to do to rectify the change," Behl says. He also notes that the solution allows users to drill down to very detailed aspects of any customer interaction, even so far as to see which call center agent handled a call. "Sometimes loyalty is affected by a bad experience with an agent, and we can see that now," Behl says. One of the reasons the Informatica solution has proven so effective for the company is its ease of use, Behl says. He says that 100 percent of executive management uses Informatica on a daily basis, nearly 90 percent of sales associates use it daily, and 70 percent of general employees are using the system every day. "With such thin margins in retail, every little piece makes a huge difference," he says. "Now, every single person can use this tool to make their job more efficient." Behl says that sales numbers have been booming since the company implemented Informatica. There has been a 20 percent improvement in the effectiveness of interactive marketing campaigns, a 25 percent increase in Web-conversion rates, and a 30 percent improvement in inventory turns, he says. "And we get the benefit of being able to share all of this great customer data with the other divisions of HP," Behl says. Apart from the uptick in sales numbers, Behl says the greatest asset Informatica has provided has been to simply make HPshopping.com run as a more efficient entity. "The product is so ingrained into our operations that I do not believe we could run the business without this tool set at this time," he says. "It really is a core component of our business strategy." The Payoff Using Informatica's analytics and data integration solutions, HPshopping.com has

improved the effectiveness of interactive marketing campaigns by 20 percent;

increased Web-conversion rates by 25 percent;

experienced a 30 percent improvement in inventory turn;

set up a strategy to share valuable customer data with all divisions of HP.