Customer Story
Location Intelligence Enhances Customer Knowledge Helping Marks & Spencer Drive Retail Success
Understanding the customer: One of the UK’s leading retailers, Marks & Spencer, offers stylish, high quality, great value clothing and home products, and outstanding quality foods — all responsibly sourced from trusted suppliers. To compete in a dynamic market, Marks & Spencer maintains a major program of ongoing evolution and development across its stores and product groups.
Analysts within the CIU are tasked with establishing a better understanding of Marks & Spencer customers and their relationships with stores.
To support this drive, the Customer Insight Unit (CIU) runs regular analysis and planning based on customer behavioral data. This analysis is used for site planning, customer mobility evaluation, and drivetime estimates, amongst others.
The analysts in the Customer Insight Unit saw a need for a sophisticated tool to help them interpret customer data for estimating store performance and acquiring a better understanding of their catchment areas and general customer shopping behavior.
Having worked with map-based data for some years, the CIU analysts readily recognized how useful location intelligence tools could be in analyzing relationships between the stores and the profiles of current and potential customers.
Precisely MapInfo Pro provides a comprehensive range of data, software and solutions that allow any organization’s information to be visualized, analysed and presented geographically. MapInfo Pro software was chosen by the team because it offered greater flexibility than other map-based business intelligence tools.
For example, it allows the analysts to work with the widest range of data, including geo-demographic, lifestyle, drivetime, customer mobility, consumer research and transport infrastructure, within a user-friendly, intuitive user interface.
Additionally, within the suite of Precisely MapInfo Pro products, MapXtreme can integrate with the organisation’s statistical and database applications, enabling analysts to create new store location models without the need to re write existing models. It also facilitates the spatial display and analysis of data such as customer credit card and postcode information. Requiring little or no consultancy support, the software met key requirements of rich functionality, user-friendly interfaces and the ability to be easily customized to support the important work of the analysts.
