Due to the speed and highly competitive nature of the retail sector, understanding the true value of a customer and communicating with them at the right time is a tedious challenge. Owing to this, many retail and travel companies tend to lose more than half of their customers every year. Exacebated by the increasing costs of acquisition online, the constant pressure of dealing with occupancy costs offline, and with all the other marketing costs, it is critical that retailers build valuable relationships with their customers. Especialy considering, one more order or booking from these customers represents a significant percentage of revenue, which presents itself as the biggest revenue opportunity a retail business has.
Big Data for Humans Ltd., is the world’s leading provider of customer insight automation to retail and travel businesses. Founded in Scotland in 2014, not by a typical team of ‘tech guys’, but by a group of highly experienced retailers with decades of shop floor customer experience under their belts. They are on a mission to harness the power of big data to bring an unprecedented depth of insight into customers; not just as lines on a spreadsheet, but as ‘humans’ with unique tastes, needs, life cycles and spending habits.
Big Data for Humans is an alumni of Techstars London, with a stellar team across their three offices in London, Glasgow and Singapore. The business received $1.2 million investment funding in June, 2015 and a further $3 million in July, 2016. They have established a global roster of clients, including Air Asia, Tesco and Selfridges Ltd. In 2017, the retail giant won an award at The Drum Digital Trading Awards APAC for their work with convenience chain 7-Eleven. More recently, Big Data For Humans was named as a ‘Selected Vendor’ in Forrester’s Now Tech: Customer Analytics Technologies, 2018.
Ace Leader & Serial Entrepreneur
Peter Ellen is the CEO and Co-Founder of Big Data for Humans Ltd. He has studied marketing at Post Grad, MCIM. Peter has over 25 years of experience in the retail and software industries; previously he Co-Founded the retailer Fopp (sold to HMV), and Maxymiser Inc. (sold to Oracle).
Commenting on running a successful retail empire, Peter asserts, “As marketers fuelled by an obsession with customers, we enjoyed first hand success through running customer centric marketing plans, but as technologists, we knew how hard it was to execute on their data. So we discovered a way to automate actionable customer insights using networks and founded Big Data for Humans so any marketer can deploy the technology. The results have been incredible!”
Peter advises the future generation of business tycoons to solve a big economic problem and build a genuinely great team. Those are the key ingredients behind building a successful empire.
Stellar Retail Solutions
The firm’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, The Customer Graph™, automates customer insights, enabling retailers and travel business users to better understand their customers and perceive who their most valuable ones are. Large volumes of data that come in through stores and online applications are tacitly understood, and therefore, the platform is made flexible for business users. Instead of recruiting specialist data analysts and data scientists, the platform automates complex data, creating and generating actionable insights, prescriptive guidance and measurement for retailers. Shedding a light on the necessity to the company’s latest launch, Peter said, “The primary reason we launched The Customer Graph was to help connect the dots between data science and revenue generation from customer marketing programs.”
The Customer Graph™ brings the power of networks to automate customer analysis, business intelligence, dynamic life-cycle and behavioral models, enabling users to easily understand, identify and sell to customers. Fast and frequently refreshed, this unique platform allows users to understand individual customers, create target clusters, find and prioritize opportunities and turn insights into smart customer marketing action that increases and measures revenue generated at an individual customer level.
The Retail Leaders Series delivers global best practice in customer marketing to a rapidly growing network of the world’s top retailers. In the first half of 2017, around 150 companies joined the best practice community to tackle the key issues ranging from retention marketing, loyalty and data science. The series includes best practice workshops, which provide pragmatic guidance for planning, using data science, campaign management and measurement, that benefits executives with the company’s Customer Marketing Pro accreditation. In addition, Big Data for Humans host exclusive partner events, including special briefings from their valued partners like Forrester Research and Deloitte Digital. Members of the Retail Leaders Community also gain privileged access to events and their research insight from the global community.
Creating a Mark in the Competitive Industry
The Customer Graph™ is dramatically out-performing traditional approaches in time and cost by rapidly monetizing data to deliver results and uplifting customer marketing ROI by 15%. It overcomes many of the frustrating barriers and bottlenecks in current customer analysis, turning raw data from transactions, and a range of other sources, into smart customer marketing programs.
Key Factors behind the Success
For Big Data for Humans, helping the clients to build market dominating Customer Marketing Programs, powered by actionable insights, are their key to success. To enable this, the team has built a best practice methodology, that enables their clients to plan strategically and optimize the investment they make in powering a customer marketing program.
