For a company like Lenskart, which has 750+ stores in India, an ecommerce website, and an ambition to expand aggressively in Singapore, US, and the Middle east, adopting an omnichannel approach is an enormous challenge and an opportunity.In an interview with ETCIO, Saurabh Agrawal, SVP – Analytics & ML, talked about how the company is solving this puzzle.
“Lenskart being a direct-to-consumer omnichannel retail brand, requires a full spectrum of analytics use cases which very few companies in the world provide. This creates a unique challenge and opportunity for professionals to learn and contribute, at the same time solve a 2 billion+ problem,” Agrawal said.
Lenskart collects permissible data at different touchpoints from its customers and tries to analyze and put this information to use for providing a superior customer experience.
Customers of Lenskart experience their products and services using the digital platform of Website, and Apps and across their 750+ stores, home try-on service, and telesales. The company saw that more than 60% of its customers in-store and offline are digitally influenced.
“Today with lines getting blurred between online & offline, it is getting easy and difficult at the same time to understand the customer journey and experience. With digitizing offline, we are able to capture more customer touchpoints and understand the customer needs and preferences. But with huge amounts of data getting generated, it is becoming difficult and critical to manage and organize the information,” Agrawal said.
“What’s interesting about marketing is that once you invest your money into marketing, the next key step is to look at which marketing channel is working well. And in this journey, we are looking to move from a single last touch attribution method to a multi-touch attribution method helping us derive better insights into their customer preferences and conversions across their 5+ touchpoint methods,” he added.
The single-touch attribution works on crediting the final aspect that pushed the customer towards using the product. We are curious to understand the ‘surround sound’ system that studies the journey of the customer from its first interaction with the organization to the final one.
To start on their goal of building a strong attribution, Lenskart has completed its first phase that involves developing a framework, allowing the company and its systems to capture the correct data and recognize where the customer is originating from.
“This project requires us to ensure we capture good quality data across all touchpoints especially Online and stitch the journey together and put this data to use and in action. Once the data is captured, the customers move across online, offline, and telesales, and then we look at the sales conversion and attribute it from the source to the campaign using attribution models,” he said.
“We have a cloud-first solution approach. The tech stack comprises technologies such as data lake — built out of AWS, Power BI for visualization, Google Analytics for Digital Analytics. For data science, it uses R & Python and a few other automation frameworks. We use a lot of vision systems for our store analytics,” he explained.
This project has completed its first phase and is a key project for Lenskart this year to build its capability.
“This project is about improving the ROI for marketing. We want to make our marketing spend more efficiently and get a higher output through it, capturing the quality customers,” he concluded.
(With inputs from Dhrumil Dhakan)
