Winning customers’ hearts (and their feedback)

Dustin Group uses data and analytics to take customer experience to the next level

Working diligently with analysis of customer data, Dustin Group shapes its marketing to the preferences of its users. Doubled conversion rates speak for themselves, but Dustin’s driven Marketing Director, Caroline Rudbeck, has a lot more to say about customer-centric business.

In 2012, when Caroline Rudbeck joined Dustin, one of the leading Nordic resellers of IT business solutions, the first thing she did was hire a CRM manager and build a segmentation model. She had a clear vision of how she wanted to build a customer-focused communications strategy at Dustin, and thorough customer data analysis was at the core of this strategy.

“If I could, I would personally meet all customers,” Rudbeck says. “That, of course, is the best marketing tactic. In the real world, however, that is hardly possible. The more customers you get, the less time you have to speak with each of them. That’s why you need data.

“It’s all about analytics; we need to know what we are doing and how it works before we do it,” she explains. “Our
marketing has benefited a lot from this approach. Insights from the sales organization, combined with customer service, enable the best marketing and open the way to the customer’s heart.”

Work with insights

Online retail competition is tough, and margins are very tight. According to Rudbeck, customer experience is affected by all touch points of engagement, for example, entering the website, getting marketing material and calling customer care. Customer experience is not just a ratio, she explains. It also includes the feeling customers have when they are in contact with the company.

Rudbeck uses a number of approaches to shed light on the preferences of Dustin’s different customer segments and the way they interact with the company’s sales and communications channels.

Dustin started using SAS two years ago. Prior to that, it applied Excel. For Rudback, SAS saves the company time by providing analysis standards, collecting data from different analyses, working with the data and enabling the best possible customer selection.

“We can examine the customer from the share of wallet and IT potential points of view to see who we should approach by what channel and [based on] who wants to be approached,” Rudbeck says. “This strategy is driven by what the customer wants from us, not what we want from the customer.

“I have looked into all the customer touch points, from our 1.3 million package deliveries every year to how our 2 million unique monthly visitors see our website, to what we say in our folders or in the order confirmation — to point out a few touch points,” she says. “We have surveyed our customer care about what questions the customers ask, what are they worried about. We are analyzing the customer profiles: what kind of customer buys only once, what kind of customer buys twice. It is all about combining the real life with statistical data.”

The coveted customer recommendation

Dustin uses Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a key metric, which indicates how likely it is that a customer will recommend Dustin. As soon as a customer is engaged with a touch point, the customer is asked about the likelihood that he or she would recommend the company. With this data, Dustin can follow each channel. Net Promoter Score evaluates different channels and supports omnichannel marketing.

In Dustin, all touch points are treated as equally important, but customer care is the most challenging channel because often a problem has triggered the customer to contact the company. The key is to find the source of dissatisfaction. Only then can the customer experience be enhanced.

“If a customer is not willing to recommend Dustin Group, we will find the root cause for it. The reason can be anything from price issues to issues with the product,” Rudbeck says. She is always working to increase NPS and gain more happy customers.

“The biggest goal to me is that a customer recommends us,” Rudbeck says. “If every customer recommends us, then we have really succeeded. That is our vision.”

Notable results

The results of Dustin’s targeted approach have been impressive: The company has been able to double conversion rates in marketing campaigns. The key to success lies in finding the best channel for each customer. For some, traditional marketing channels such as catalogs are still very effective. These are not automatically sent to all customers but just to those who find them rewarding.

“When we look for new customers, we first look at our best customers and try to find twin prospects,” Rudbeck explains. “In the future I also want to have predictive models to know what customers want before they know it themselves. By helping customers find the right solutions for their needs or by providing them with something they have not yet realized they need, we really make them happy.”

About Dustin Group

Originally founded in 1984 to import floppy disks from the US, Dustin Group has thrived on its strong customer focus and now boasts a portfolio of 200,000 products and employs 900 people — 22 of whom are part of Rudbeck’s organization.