Maveryx Success Stories
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SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONSGetting to Know Our Customers: Alteryx + Wolseley
Conor McMahon - Multichannel Analyst
Wolseley is the UK operating company of Ferguson plc, the world’s leading specialist distributor of plumbing and heating products. I am the Head of the Multichannel Analytics team, where our focus is to drive digital growth and innovation through the use of data and analytics. The overall goal of the multichannel team is to increase online business by better understanding our customers. We have learned that customers are more loyal if they come through the eCommerce channel, they buy more products, and they are return customers to retain. The first use case leveraging Alteryx was to automate the daily process of identifying newly registered eCommerce customers.
I had been using Alteryx Designer for a few years prior to coming to Wolseley and saw an opportunity to improve the analytic insights of my new team to improve business performance. We were challenged by one of our critical, daily processes: identifying new eCommerce customers. What should have been an easy task was exceptionally challenging and time consuming. Each day, the team had to track eCommerce behavior to better understand newly registered online customers. Before Alteryx, this lived entirely in Excel. Within Wolseley, there is no center of excellence or central analytics function, so naturally what comes with that is fragmented data pockets and different technologies, different teams, all doing their own thing.
The result of this is, things are very siloed and we have pockets of data all over the place; SAP business Objects, Salesforce, Google Analytics, and naturally, to really understand what our customers are doing you need to blend all of these data extracts. We simply didn’t have the visibility to see across all these data sources.
To determine newly registered eCommerce customers, we had to combine different data extracts from Excel, do a lot of v-lookups, and use nested formulas and a number of pivot tables. It was a data churn exercise that required opening different spreadsheets, linking them all together, filtering, summarizing, and a bit of copy and paste. It was a horrible process and quite fragile with no ability to automate.
Before Alteryx, this process would take our team 1.5 - 2 hours each day. It was a painful and manual process. We needed a platform that could automate this process from end-to-end. We could create a robust and repeatable workflow with Alteryx Designer that we can run automatically each morning.
The Alteryx modules analyses transactional data from multiple sources to combine a holistic view of newly registered eCommerce customers. As part of my team’s Career Development Plan, a strong focus was placed on technical development using Alteryx’s product certification (Designer Core and Advanced) and we’ve now created several Macros which supplement all internal workflows, therefore making our processes even faster. We’ve leveraged the email notification functionality so when a new customer registers within an eBusiness Development Managers’ region, they received an automated notification alerting them to a potential new customer (with customer account number, number, projected sales spend and product split), therefore making our insight actionable and driving further eCommerce growth – this has been a tremendous success for us.
With Alteryx, we come in the morning now and we literally press play and off the workflow goes, sends the output automatically to the team. We just let the magic happen. This has helped our team out in a huge way, enabling time to be better spend on value added tasks that drive process improvement.
We are saving 20-25 hours a month with Alteryx from this single process alone and over c.100 hours per month across our entire reporting workstream. The benefit is two-fold: it’s great from a time saving perspective, but it’s also a value-add to the company. With the time we have saved we were able to start new projects including customer segmentation with Alteryx and Google Analytics API. Bringing in the online data has been enlightened and has allowed us to start adding personalization to the website. This is huge for us.
We have put Alteryx at the heart of everything we do. Before Alteryx, things were very challenging and not very engaging. That’s where Alteryx is such a fantastic platform as it gives you that kind of sense of what you are trying to achieve but doing it in a really fun and intuitive way. I think one of the greatest benefits has been seeing how the team is much more engaged now because of the platform. They are having fun doing their work. It’s really like night and day. Our senior stakeholders are starting to see that shift, see that my team is a lot more engaged in their roles, and adding considerable value to the company.
We started with one license 12 months ago and now our team of four are all leveraging the platform. We have our own internal Alteryx user group at Wolseley to learn from each other by sharing ideas and defining best practices for the team. The team members have truly become champions for the platform. We are starting to see interest from numerous other teams, where we now have eight other teams using the technology through the enablement work my team has led on. It has been truly transformational to see how my team is now performing, all thanks to Alteryx.
