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Shop Direct

Shop Direct turns to gaming industry to help model real-time personalisation drive

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By Jennifer Faull, Deputy Editor

November 5, 2014 | 3 min read

Shop Direct has turned to the gaming industry to help guide the next phase of its ongoing personalisation drive, aimed at transforming the customer experience across its Very.co.uk, Littlewoods.com and Isme.com properties.

As it enters into year three of the five-year project, it has invested in technology which will help it make changes to the websites in real-time as opposed to the current laborious process.

The online-only retailer’s deputy chief executive, Gareth Jones, told The Drum that currently it “manually winds the handle” to implement changes as it harnesses financial services, retail, browsing, and product data to personalise the customer experience.

“In the future we’ll be able to power that seamlessly into the platform as we’re learning about customers. So we’ll be able to personalise the customer experience in real-time.”

Jones said it is something it hasn’t seen in the UK market, and the challenge is to find a benchmark for best practices.

“The gaming industries have been doing this for some time and are more advanced at this sort of at-scale personalisation."

Jones explained: “[Gaming companies] have built proprietary systems and pieces of technology that allow them to take the data that they’re learning on customers and power the right games and right methods for them to play and enjoy the online experience. These guys have been doing that for four or five years and have been getting some major wins in terms of customer engagement and profitability.”

He explained that it is "a much more simplistic industry” but the principles are similar and, as it ramps up recruitment to its Liverpool-based tech lab, hiring talent from the gaming industry as opposed to retail is becoming more frequent.

“One of our non-executive directors – Gigi Levy-Weiss - was the previous chief executive of 888.com so that tells you that we’re certainly leaning on the experiences coming out of that industry,” added Jones.

As it progresses with this plan, transparency around how it is using customer data will be the chief consideration. “It’s at the absolute centre of our personalisation strategy. It’s brought up at every meeting.

“The utopia is that the customers can see the decisions that we’re making in serving up the content there and then. I would expect that at the end of this five year plan that ever customer is aware of what we’re doing and how we’re adding value to them,” he added.

Asked how ROI is proven, Jones pointed to Shop Direct's most recent finacial statement which noted a 512 per cent surge in pre-tax profits to £40.4m verus £6.6m for the previous year.

In particular, Very.co.uk delivered a 23.1 per cent growth in sales to £700m.

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