Quadstone's Decisionhouse Increases Profitability Of C&A's Database Marketing Program
Quadstone Limited has announced that C&A, Europe's number one fashion retailer, has experienced a significant increase in direct mail response and profitability since implementing Decisionhouse, Quadstone's customer behavior modeling software. Decisionhouse enables C&A to analyze actual purchase behavior in order to improve the service to their million plus UK customers, with the potential to handle many more millions of customers across Europe.
Based in Brussels, Belgium, C&A operates 579 stores in 13 European countries and mails hundreds of thousands of customers each year, grouped into two major direct mail campaigns. C&A is using Decisionhouse's high-speed analysis tools and interactive graphics to identify both purchase behavior patterns and key predictive demographics in large databases of customer information. This enables C&A to target, acquire, and retain their most valuable customers according to business and marketing objectives. Since the implementation of Quadstone's products and methodology, C&A has not only experienced direct mailing responses more than doubling to well over 6%, but has also achieved "mailing contribution" (i.e. profit) values more than 20 times better than their results in previous years.
A Quadstone service offering based on their new Transactionhouse product extracts customer purchase behavior information from detailed transaction data. Decisionhouse combines this behavioral data with demographic data and the business analyst's knowledge.
"The advanced interactive visualization is a unique mechanism for extracting valuable business insight from data, giving our business analysts control, instant feedback, and a better understanding of the subtleties and detail that comprise the database," said Robert Amelung, Head of Business Development at C&A. "Decisionhouse enables C&A to improve our customer segmentation and targeting, and to profitably optimize the communication mechanisms we use. The product's capability and speed to interactively analyze whole customer bases is a major advantage compared to others in the marketplace."
"The key to business growth and success in a dynamic competitive market is to understand customer behavior in order to predict and influence it," said Mark Smith, senior vice president of marketing at Quadstone. "As the size of customer databases grow and the importance of customer relationship management increases, companies like C&A need to combine business knowledge with detailed customer data to deliver a true understanding of their customers and their purchase behavior; and in turn deploy faster results back to the market."
C&A chose Decisionhouse for its capability to interactively analyze entire databases - not just a sample from a larger data set-with enough speed and ease of use to allow the marketing departments to run the program without major IT support. Decisionhouse enables C&A to bring the design and execution of its database marketing campaign in-house, after previously outsourcing the service.
"In the future, as we expand our use of customer-focused analysis throughout the company, we intend to use other aspects of Quadstone's technology to obtain business input from country-specific management and achieve improved learnings from our activities across the whole of our European operations," said Amelung.
C&A is a leading European fashion retailer. It was one of the first to make good ready-to-wear clothes available to ordinary people at an affordable price. An important part in the C&A Mission Statement highlights that that the C&A brands will provide "a wide range of exclusive and appealing functional and fashionable collections offering the best value available." Today, C&A has more than 550 stores and over 40,000 employees in 13 European countries. From pioneering ready-to-wear clothing over 150 years ago, to the bikini and the mini-skirt, C&A has sought to bring the latest fashions to the greatest number of people, offering the widest possible variety from which you can choose, across almost the whole of Europe.
Quadstone Limited is a leading developer of customer behavior modeling software for business analysts in the banking, insurance, retail, and telecommunications industries. Quadstone's Decisionhouse and Transactionhouse high-speed analysis tools swiftly create visual, graphical models of customer behavior, such as purchasing patterns and consumer profiles, enabling organizations to devise more effective marketing campaigns according to the needs of their volumes of customers.
Founded in November 1994, Quadstone began operations in March 1995. The company employs over 70 staff and is based in Edinburgh, Scotland, with additional headquarters located in Boston, Massachusetts and London, England. Quadstone maintains strategic international alliances with NCR Corporation, Siemens, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Quadstone was recently selected as Best Start-Up Business by the British Venture Capital Association and The Financial Times. In addition, both the company and its products have won numerous other recent awards. For more information, please call 617-753-7393 or visit http://www.quadstone.com.