A Data-Driven Approach to Customer Relationships

In 2015, store managers at BUCO, a hardware retailer with 46 locations across South Africa, had an intuitive feel for whether men or women were their most frequent customers, which locations had the most loyal customers, and from what suburbs the most valuable customers to a given store were coming. That all changed shortly after Judy Gounden, a group marketing executive at BUCO’s parent company, Iliad Africa Ltd., began using Market Edge, a commercial data service provided by Nedbank Group Ltd., South Africa’s fourth-largest bank by market value.

According to Gounden, Market Edge — which packages credit and debit card information with geolocation, demographic, and other transactional data — enabled new insights into customers’ behaviors that would have been difficult to identify without the new tool. These insights in turn have changed the way the company operates, says Gounden:

We can now look at card transaction data and say, “On a Wednesday at 9:00 a.m., we had the most card transactions versus any other day in the week, and most of these people are 50 and 60 years old.” That’s our pensioner day. In some geographical regions, we’ve got very high loyalty, and in others, we get new customers constantly, so the tool helps us think about how we market in each region. What’s more, when I told a store manager who believed that most of his business was derived from local residents that, in fact, half of his business was coming from residents that lived in a town 10 kilometers away, his eyes went wide and he said, “How do you know that?” So we shared the data with him. At BUCO’s location in Nelspruit, which is on the Crocodile River in the northeast near Kruger National Park, we learned through the data that a large portion of our clientele was female, so we introduced a Saturday craft workshop featuring chalk paint. It’s the latest craze in do-it-yourself painting. The workshop was a huge hit; it just accelerated the craft area of that business.