Client Project - Sons

Q. What triggered the search for external support?

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Will: We recognised that we were growing at a rate faster than our headcount and didn’t have the technical skills in house to get a handle on our data. We were very good at looking at data in siloes across our markets, and taking insights, but it wasn’t consistent or structured. We made strategic decisions using this data – we wanted to get a better handle on the impacts of these decisions. Primarily, we wanted to get more of a handle on attribution, customer behaviour and the economics behind customer lifetime value, to help us better serve our customers and grow faster.

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Q. How did you find Coppett Hill?

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Will: We heard about Coppett Hill through on of our Board Advisors, who had previously worked with the Coppett Hill team and spoke very highly of them.

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Q. Why did you choose to work with Coppett Hill rather than any of the alternatives that you were considering?

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Will: Our other option at the time was bringing in headcount – we felt that valuable expertise came from the Coppett Hill team having completed projects like this at both sides at the table, both operationally and as investors. They brought the operational experience of for example knowing what the key metrics were for a for a fast-growing ecommerce business, also brought an investors perspective, for example on costing. We thought that bringing in external people with relevant expertise, followed by bringing in internal resource would be a good marriage following a handover period.

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Q. What were the objectives?

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Will: Our objectives were focused around our product offering that we derive from our understanding of customer behaviour – we expected to see a natural evolution of our product offering as we gained more insight into customer behaviour. We have an excellent aftercare team who speak to all of our customers – we wanted to get some insight into the best timeline to speak to customers and what to say. Essentially, we wanted to look at all of the communication points we as a business had with our customers to maximise LTV.

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Q. What has been the impact so far, and what further impact do you expect?

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Will: As a business, we were data focused before, but we were siloed and where we are now is a huge step forward. We have a really robust KPI platform which tracks all our markets. On a daily basis I can see all the trading metrics I need to, and I have a better view of customer behaviour/LTV. I start each morning at 7:30 by looking at the KPI dashboards for the previous day, and I look at these reports before I go to any of the teams.

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Our dataset is structured in a way that is easy to use, and as a team we are starting take action off the back of that – we are ~45 days in to actually using this data to make strategic decisions, and getting to a point where we can look at the results of these. I would say we are where we wanted to be with the project.

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Q. Are there any particular insights which you have gained which you think you might not have been aware of otherwise?

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Will: We’ve gained insight into marketing ROI in terms of our attribution, and the ability to get a better understanding of this by switching off/scaling up activity across our channels and viewing the impact. We also observed some variance in customer lifetime value by demographic, with location as one example, which we can now hone in on and use to be more precise in our targeting. For example, we are testing feeding estimated LTV back into our PPC activity to inform our bidding models.

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Q. Is there anything you would highlight as a strength for Coppett Hill?

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Will: As a team you have a really good understanding of the business side of things - irrespective of whether you’re a start-up, scale up or more on the mature side of things, there’s a good understanding there. There is also the investor lens which you bring as well. I think you’ve also hired a team who are all proficient in what you’re building – be it Tableau, BI etc – you can do all of that. I think the competence and the experience is there, and I’d be positive from a referral perspective – if someone was to tell me they were looking at doing a project like this I would certainly recommend.

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Q. What could we have done differently?

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Will: We had a really excellent session on scope where you went through exactly what we were going to do, drilling down from objectives to a more granular level – we could have done with another session like that before the end of the project to help keep track, because with our project there were so many moving parts. Perhaps a more interactive project management tool, where everyone could see the progress of all workstreams at any given time and contribute, would go a long way in managing stakeholders who are going to be a bit further away like myself.

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Q. When it comes to working with Coppett Hill overall, how would you characterise that experience?

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Will: In the business, we have a no pothole policy – it’s one of our values. We like to work with people who are down to earth, and are easy to get on with, which I think describes the Coppett Hill team. You have shown a great understanding of how to use data in the ecommerce world, so that’s been positive all-round.

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From a project perspective, it’s been well structured. Overall, our team are very complimentary about working with Coppett Hill.