The challenge
Ocado Retail’s advertising strapline is “There’s an Ocado just for you”—and it means it. The online grocery company, a 50-50 joint venture between UK retail giants Ocado Group and Marks & Spencer, aims to provide every customer with a hyper-personalized experience. But to achieve that level of personalization, Ocado Retail needed a new set of foundational IT systems—from a real-time data platform to a marketing suite—to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time. Starting afresh in its joint venture with M&S meant Ocado Retail could go cloud-first from the outset. That would enable it to scale up fast to meet customer expectations, but it would need help from a digital transformation partner with proven cloud skills and experience.
Our approach
Ocado Retail asked its technology vendors to recommend a partner who could offer the right skills, and Cognizant’s name came up several times. Ocado Retail and Cognizant set to work to design and build the data and technology foundation for the new, hyper-personalized customer marketing experience.
Using an agile delivery approach, Cognizant built a platform that brings data, campaign assets and analytics together, giving Ocado Retail the tools to deliver automated, hyper-personalized campaigns via email, SMS and push notifications. An enterprise data platform built on Google Cloud, extracts data from internal and external sources to create a 360° view of each customer to enable highly personalized marketing. A new marketing suite combines 360° customer data with Adobe Campaign modules. And a workforce scheduling tool featuring predictive analytics to forecast busy and less-busy periods helps to ensure agents in the Customer Hub are always available to assist customers, while keeping a lid on contact center costs.
