TCS Helps ICA Sverige Drive Hyper-personalization at Scale

Overview

ICA Sverige, a leading Swedish grocery retailer, wanted a holistic view of customers to enable hyper-personalization as part of their loyalty transformation program.

The company, with over 1,200 stores in different formats, also operates multiple other lines of businesses, including banking, insurance, and pharmacy, besides retail, which is their flagship business.

ICA Sverige partnered with TCS for digital transformation of the marketing function across the enterprise to strengthen their customer loyalty program strategy.

Challenge

The Swedish retailer wanted to shift from product-centricity to customer-centricity to enable hyper-personalization.

For this, they had to transform into a data-driven organization.

Moreover, to retain their leadership position in the Nordics, ICA Sverige wanted to improve brand stickiness by transforming their loyalty program. A pre-requisite for this was a holistic customer view-the company required a single, unified view of all its customers.

Additionally, the retailer was faced with the following challenges:

• 99% of customer communication was through physical letters, and there was no digital marketing capability to interact with customers.
• Campaign communication cycle time was between three and five weeks.
• There was no standardized way to measure campaign effectiveness.
• Offer allocation to customers was rule-based (for instance, making an offer to customers shopping for more than 1,000 kroner) as customer behavior data was not captured due to a lack of customer persona-based segments for targeted communications.
• Very low offer redemption rates as rule-based offers had little relevance to customers.

Solution

TCS developed a data analytics platform to provide a unified view of customer data in near real-time.

The unified view enabled ICA to become a data-driven organization.

As the strategic IT partner to ICA Sverige, TCS studied the retailer's customer strategy to identify gaps and proposed the to-be state by outlining the business priorities.

After a thorough assessment of customer information maturity, data and analytics capability, industry benchmarking, and target architecture and realization roadmap, TCS helped ICA build a data hub that offered a 360-degree customer view in near real-time.

ICA also realized the need for a digital marketing suite, and TCS helped them identify the right product. Data from the digital marketing suite was also ingested into the data platform for a more holistic view of customers.

The data platform provides the foundation data on customers for all marketing initiatives of ICA. All downstream applications can fetch these customer insights for comprehensive marketing campaigns, thus strengthening ICA's loyalty program.

The TCS solution enabled ICA to optimize digital marketing strategies by leveraging curated customer data, which resulted in increased customer engagement through targeted marketing campaigns.

TCS further empowered the data platform with capabilities to transform it into a real-time marketing data hub-a data and analytics platform to support advanced analytics use cases by leveraging new-age tech stack, thereby optimizing the overall associated cost.

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