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Case study

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.

Ocado lives up to its brand promise

A collaborative partnership between Ocado Retail and Cognizant saw the platform delivered on time, to budget and with minimal scope change. Ocado Retail now has a powerful, scalable platform to support its ambitions to grow online sales and customer loyalty. The retailer has reaped early benefits including an uptick in customers and a comparatively low three-year total cost of ownership (TCO) for its data and analytics platform. Now, the platforms deliver a flexible, scalable technology foundation that supports future growth and delivers timely, relevant and targeted communications through customers’ preferred channels.

17%

year on year growth in Ocado Retail’s customer base in the first six months

26%–34%

lower TCO than other cloud alternatives

Delivers

scalable platforms that support future growth