Lighting up the Market: British Multinational Tobacco Organization Improves Customer Engagement Through Actionable Insights Into Customer Trends

Client overview

Our Client is the world’s fourth largest international tobacco organization and the world’s largest producer of fine cut tobacco and tobacco papers.

It has 30 factories worldwide and its products are sold in around 120 countries.

They are also a global FMCG business and supported by over 25000 employee’s with a revenue generation of over 30 billion pounds.

Not all smoke and mirrors: clearing the air with greater customer insights

Our Client’s data was scattered across multiple legacy systems, resulting in significant inefficiencies and inaccuracies in both sales reporting and customer insights. This fragmentation made it difficult to obtain a cohesive view of customer behavior and trends, leading to flawed strategies and missed opportunities.

The disparate systems were not designed to communicate with each other, creating bottlenecks in data processing and analysis. Consequently, the organization struggled with delayed reports and unreliable information, hampering its ability to make informed decisions and effectively engage with its customer base.

Smoke Signals: decoding customer trends to ignite engagement

By leveraging advanced data analytics, our Client was able to decoded intricate customer trends that were previously obscured by fragmented data. This newfound clarity enabled them to tailor their efforts with precision, effectively sparking heightened customer interest and loyalty.

The insights gained from analyzing these ‘smoke signals’ not only enhanced their understanding of customer preferences but also ignited a new era of engagement, driving both customer satisfaction and business growth.

Our Client benefitted from a number of key changes including:

• Moving to Salesforce CG Cloud-BI/Data Platform solution as part of its Modernization initiative.
• Optimizing its Trade Promotional Management (TPM) system; the initial phase of this focused on the analysis of the TPM solution tools and associated processes with a combination of Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud(CG Cloud) and US Data Lake in the HIVE Platform.
• Implemented the Imperial Brands global data platform ‘HIVE’ to enable advanced reporting and analytics. Both systems were integrated into existing applications like SAP and NetSuite as ERP systems.
• Enabled field representatives to plan and execute store visits efficiently, ensuring consistent and productive interactions with retailers.

In addition, testing of the end-to-end solutions of their business with niche skill sets on Salesforce Consumer Goods was undertaken. This led to:

• 45 Enterprise Service Business (ESB) integrations and 59data integrations were part of SIT.
• Part of UATinvolved giving walkthroughs to the business users for critical functionalities and understanding of any gaps, as well as raising defects for the same on behalf of business users.
• Monitoring the raised defects until they were resolved and getting sign-off from the business team.
• UAT testing support which involves the creation of UAT scripts that covered the end-to-end flow of the consumer goods journey.

To ensure seamless operations and rapid resolution of production issues, the hypercare support provided played a crucial role. Whenever a production issue arises, the team promptly triages and replicates the problem in lower environments, meticulously analyzing its root cause. Once identified, they work diligently to fix the issue and retest it in these controlled environments.

Only after thorough testing and validation was the go-ahead given to move the solution back into production. This rigorous process guarantees that any fixes are robust and reliable, minimizing the risk of recurring issues and ensuring the stability and performance of production systems.

Key benefits

Our Client’s stated goals were all met and achieved within the allotted time frame, including:

• Created a 953+ robust test suite capturing 100% of the requirements needed.
• Improved Customer Engagement by up to 70%.
• Integration testing was made possible in SIT/UAT environments through reducing manual data creation by up to 40%.
• Enhance sales productivity through equipping sales teams with modern tools. This improved their efficiency and effectiveness by up to 50%.

As a result, our Client is now rolling out Consumer Goods Cloud and Field Service to validate critical business processes in retail execution, promotions management, payments, Einstein analytics and accessibility of the application on mobile devices.