Earlier this year, Ashley Musumeci, Director Go-to-Market, CRM at Media.Monks, spoke to a packed house at Salesforce Connections. This exclusive 15-minute video captures her presentation in which she outlines how brand marketers are using Salesforce to deliver a personalized customer experience at scale when a clear data strategy is in place.

Think of, let’s say, a multinational holding company with about six subsidiaries in retail and banking, operating in seven countries with physical stores and both website and app platforms. Not all subsidiaries are present everywhere, and not all platforms use the same language. Now imagine wanting to unify all of that into a scalable system that provides updated, accurate information about your consumers—processed through reliable metrics that allow you to get a better grasp of their needs and interests. Not exactly child’s play, is it?

Our partners at Falabella, one of the largest retail companies in Latin America, were faced with that exact challenge in their ambition to develop their technological capabilities and strengthen their logistics to support the rapid growth of their online sales. The ultimate goal was simple: to better serve customers through personalized solutions and increase the company’s overall efficiency. The path to get there, though, required considerable expertise in the use and implementation of data. 

Growing Its Technological Muscles

Falabella’s flagship department stores, as well as its shopping centers and supermarkets, have crowned it the largest retail company in Chile, and one of the most important ones in Latin America. But while this long-standing brand was built on the foundations of a traditional physical store, the importance of having a strong online presence has never eluded them. 

Today, Falabella is in pursuit of becoming one of the region’s top ecommerce players. In other words, to take the relevance it’s built in the physical world and replicate it in the digital space. But to become the go-to ecommerce platform for a variety of needs, it had to integrate its four pre-existing platforms and their data into a single marketplace and a measuring system.

Our Head of Data Growth, South Cone, Walter Rebollo, was there to support them on that journey. “We put together a dedicated team that worked side by side with the brand’s, serving as a technological muscle,“ he says.

For a company of this magnitude, any technological miscommunication between properties could hinder the accuracy of their data analysis, which explains the need for a foundational transformation. “Our team of analytics experts, consultants and engineers helped the brand design measurement plans that were aligned throughout the organization. They developed dashboards, documentation, manuals and provided technical support for their implementations,” adds Rebollo.  

It’s More Than Just Statistics

In addition to serving as the technological muscle, the team introduced the brand to a more analytical and data-driven mindset. After all, being cognizant of the potential that lies in one’s first-party data is the first step towards building a sharpened customer experience. And it’s not about playing with statistics to see what sticks. Think of first-party data as a source of truth that illustrates our customers’ personalities and behaviors; a roadmap of sorts to support your audience across the entire customer journey.

Javier Fernández Morales, Falabella’s Regional Head of Performance & Growth, puts it plainly, “As one of the sites with the highest traffic in the region, our first-party data is a key asset in order to provide a better shopping and browsing experience.

In retail, consumers expect an omnichannel experience that’s tailored to them. They want to be able to switch between app, web and devices across the purchase journey from start to finish. We designed the analytics framework to capture that information, creating a setup that eased the understanding of how audiences behave and what they are interested in. 

“The digital transformation of Falabella encompassed a bunch of steps that led to the final goal,” explains Gastón Fossati, our VP of Data Growth SPLA. “For example, the implementation of the web ecommerce funnel for all countries, assessments to define the attribution model to be used, baking in machine learning for audience prediction, the implementation of enhanced conversions in Google Analytics and a monthly consulting service to work on the Firebase project for the app, among other things.” 

An Empowered Team Leads to Fast Decision-Making

Beyond providing a seamless customer experience, having a single measurement system aligned throughout the organization can be as helpful internally as it is for customer-facing interactions. Think about it: refined measurement leads to effective automated models, which can then save the team time and energy. “From a backend standpoint, having a better data management system has made it possible for us to develop a well-executed product scalability model,” says Fernández Morales. By allowing marketing technology tools to be executed with greater agility, we empower specialists to make better decisions, faster.

That said, the development of an integrated measurement system from the ground up is not something that happens overnight. In this year-long project—which stemmed from a three-year partnership—both teams worked in lockstep to create a measurement strategy according to each unit’s goals, integrate Google Analytics and train the brand’s team to act upon the information. “Our approach is one of democratizing knowledge, so we always make sure we’re not just delivering but also teaching our partners how and why we do what we do,” says Rebollo. 

Throughout that process, both teams blended with one another to the point where there was almost no distinction between each. “I find it truly remarkable that we’ve created a single team with not only a common goal but also a shared spirit,” says Lorena Alva Salazar, Head of Growth & Martech at Falabella.

Today, they can bank not only on a solid, unified team, but also on reliable metrics that are immediately available for quick decision-making. The phase-out of third-party cookies poses no threat, and they are in fact better prepared to forge a closer relationship with consumers. First, an integrated framework and multiple data collection points provide invaluable information on their consumers. And second, the brand can now empower users to choose how much information they want to share, thus safeguarding their privacy.