Understand customer movement within your B2B online sales portal. This was one of the main objectives of Avon, a company with 60 years of operations in Brazil that makes an average of 150 thousand orders per day, when developing a Big Data & Analytics project, which benefits from data extracted from the online world and the intersects with the historic foundation of MicroStrategy's analytics platform. The initiative brought to the company, a world leader in the beauty market and one of the largest direct selling companies in the world, the ability to almost instantly answer several business questions capable of influencing decision-making and personifying offers for its customers, all by analyzing the buying behavior of millions of users.
According to Raquel D'Anello, IT director at Avon, preventing the "cart" from being abandoned in online sales, understanding the movement on the site, as well as identifying the reasons that lead customers to give up on a purchase, is one of the main challenges for companies, regardless of their area of activity. In the case of Avon, especially after the insertion of tags throughout the B2B sales portal, this need became even more evident, as it became possible to follow all the movements of the reseller on the site and know what she was doing and at what time, generating a large volume of information. In addition, BI already allowed access to history based on previous orders and invoicing, as well as data from social networks.
"Faced with this scenario, our question was: what to do with this pile of information? Questions about behavior started to pour in and we, a little unsure of what to do, arrived at MicroStrategy and said: 'our traditional BI doesn't work What's on the market? We've heard about big data, what can we do with it?' And then came the idea of doing a pilot and starting to work with this information", explains Raquel.
Project step by step
With low investments, short term and scarce resources, but with a strong desire to make it happen, as the executive herself points out, the project began to be conceived. The pilot was done using a relatively simple and low-cost machine and all this infrastructure was taken to the cloud. The investment to make this initial kick-off possible, including the costs of labor and consulting, totaled around US$50,000, which is much lower than what is usually invested in Big Data & Analytics projects. A resource from the IT team and a professional from the MicroStrategy consulting team were responsible for the execution. The first attempts had no effect and it was only after the involvement of Avon's business area, called Digital, that the project began to take off. "We wanted to discover and demystify this big data thing. We knocked on Digital's door and asked what the president was asking and they couldn't answer, or, then, to know what took three months to answer. We got back about four questions and, based on them, we were able to understand what data from our transactional system, B2B and social media needed to be taken to this system. And so we did", says Raquel.
The results obtained with this Big Data & Analytics project were many and helped boost Avon's online sales. The ability to customize digital offers based on specific retailer behavior on the site was a significant advance. Today, Avon's Digital area looks at the purchase history, cross-references with navigation information and performs analyzes that generate insights in real time. With the support of big data, it is also possible to correct routes and errors in campaigns at any time, which creates a greater capacity to plan the next steps.
Another important point is that Avon has a portfolio of more than three thousand active products and campaigns change every 15 days, which made it impossible, for example, to be able to draw estimates. With the information generated from Big Data, it is possible to anticipate forecasting, while the next cycle is being planned. Apart from that, the project also enabled some predictive analyses, such as, for example, knowing which of the resellers might not complete the cart. It is possible to see who has entered, not purchased and activated via call center, whatsapp or SMS, while the person is still at the time of purchase.
"We were also able to review the credit limit online, which was once one of the villains, as the person would start to place an order, but then proceed to remove some items from the cart, because their credit limit had exceeded, for example, and this led her to give up on the purchase. We could already see that this increased the woman's satisfaction and made her stay on the site longer. And the longer she stays, the greater probability of sales we have. Not to mention that, understanding the behavior, I can also take actions that call the woman's attention", emphasizes Raquel.
To present this data, a series of dashboards and ad hoc reports were created for some of the areas, such as Marketing and Digital, which prefer to receive the information in this format to carry out their own analyses. The environment is still fully operational and now the next step is to grow. As more complex questions arrive, it is necessary, for example, to plug in more transactional data and increase the number of tags in the B2B portal.
"Today, nothing prevents us from going further with Big Data & Analytics. It's just a matter of focus. Because we've seen that you can be robust and flexible with security and low cost. The cloud works and is secure - which, incidentally, was one of my fears – and it is often even better than the internal infrastructure, which has bureaucracy and limited resources. Having the right information, at the right time, is synonymous with success. Those who work in IT know this and those who work in business area knows this twice as much", he concludes.
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