Automotive Data Strategy, Analytics & Insight 

Exco Partners was engaged to implement a customer engagement initiative targeting an immersive and personalised online channel experience for a large international automotive replacement parts organisation.

Data analysis identified a propensity for members to purchase once for a specific need. The hypothesis was that harnessing all of the business’s vehicle data and matching it to a consumer’s registration, would allow a car enthusiast could engage in their B2C channel with products, offers and insights tailored to their specific vehicle. It was felt that this would have an immediate impact on sales as well as brand loyalty (shown in repeat visits to the online store).

Our method

Purchase data was gathered and analyzed to understand the size and scale of the opportunity (to inform a business case) and to baseline current ‘repeat’ buying by dimension (product, location, car manufacturer and vehicle model) and confirm the viability for using customer registration information in the way needed to provide an accurate result.

The user journey was assessed as part of the overall design and analysis process. The analysis helped to understand that the technology capability needed to deliver the required experience.

The data analysis continued after launch to gain further insight and to particularly cater for quality and error handling scenarios.

For example, the data analysis identified a scenario where “vehicle registration” errors would occur and prevent the consumer for accessing the correct vehicle information and parts, resulting in bounces and/or abandoned carts.

The analysis lead to the implementation of a change to allow for a consumer to identify the issue which would be flagged with a member of customer service for follow up and resolution prior to their next visit to the site.

Whilst the lower-level customer considerations were included as above, the secondary “customer” of a partner wishing to use this service were also considered. In this case security considerations were applied as well as identifying which data a partner had access to (by level) and how they would seamlessly incorporate the API into their technology stack were also part of the architecture.

Within 3 months of first release a total of 10 partners had been able to incorporate the service with little to no technical code changes or deployments needed. This frictionless architecture was a core component of the overall benefit of the solution.

From the initial data analysis insight, Exco Partners defined the user stories, gathered and agreed the specific business requirements from Business, Security, Data and Technology stakeholders, and then designed the technical solution and led the development team to build the API solution.

The outcome

Since go-live, the business has seen a significant improvement in ‘repeat’ buying and other identified metrics of loyalty program member aligned purchases as well as an overall increase in the revenue generation of the B2C channel (measured before and after the release of this feature). Additionally, channel partnerships have been established with product suppliers who are utilising this customer to registration API embedded in their own go-to-market channels resulting in more product sales and stronger, more aligned industry partnership models.