Case study
How River Island uses ResolvID to effectively perform identity resolution on customer data
Summary
Founded in the 1940s, River Island is now one of the UK and Ireland’s largest fashion retailers. A British high street icon specialising in trend-led, affordable fashion, it was one of the first high street retailers to launch online in the 1990s. The company operates through more than 300 stores globally, as well as e-commerce platforms, with 40% of revenue made from online sales. As an innovative retailer always at the front of the market, the business knew providing seamless, personalised, omnichannel customer experience was vital, but needed to improve its customer data to deliver on a Single Customer View (SCV).
Company size
5,000 – 10,000
Industry
Retail
Services used
Challenge
When River Island began building a marketing and analytics data technology environment with an SCV in-house – a single record that merges all customer data in one place – it recognised that its current customer data set was not deduplicated. It needed real-time identity resolution that could return a single unique customer identifier to River Island.
Data management
Bringing the entire SCV in-house posed a significant operational challenge to River Island. There were many different data feeds that needed to be terminated and also incoming and outbound data that lacked clarity and needed re-evaluation.
Problems of the past
This challenge was compounded by the fact that the original data feeds were also set up by employees who had since left the business, resulting in a trial by fire with their SCV.
Solution
CACI configured ResolvID, a cloud native solution hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud infrastructure, to supply River Island with data cleansing, standardisation, identity resolution and deduplication. Developed with a microservices architecture, the bespoke platform offers significant advantages through its scaling, resilience and flexibility when rapid changes and improvements are required.
ResolvID comprises horizontally and vertically scalable microservices that perform different functions with a seamless interface to enhance River Island’s accessibility. The solution leverages advanced deterministic name and address matching techniques in conjunction with digital and non-digital identifiers specific to River Island customers and their data. As part of this initiative, CACI took a three-step approach to effectively perform identity resolution on River Island’s customer data.
Results
Leveraging ResolvID has resulted in many tangible benefits for River Island, including the creation of various customer dashboards to monitor more targeted figures and generate better, more timely data that bolsters targeted customer campaigns. There have also been noticeable improvements in workload efficiencies, such as cutting down the time required to action workloads to increase the team’s focus on refining their future strategy of doing more with their data to retain oversight on customer performance.
This real-time capability now enables the confident and immediate actioning of data and customer signups to produce effective campaigns based on genuine buying behaviours and generate accurate results.
