Clarks
Clarks needed to increase efficiency at their tills and they recognised that using a postcode lookup service for retail would overcome their checkout challenges.
Clarks is a British-based, international shoe manufacturer and retailer. The company was founded in 1825 by two brothers in Street, Somerset, England – where it still has its headquarters today. Clarks is now within the top 100 retailers and have over 1,000 branded stores and franchises around the world.
Challenge
Clarks previously had no address lookup service installed across their tills, meaning address input was a manual task for cashiers and presented a number of challenges, such as:
Inaccurate data captured – affecting future communications and negatively impacting customer satisfaction.
Inconsistent structure of data.
Frustration at checkout due to time taken to input details
Furthermore, Clark’s databases had inconsistent invoices with varying structures which posed further challenges, including:
- Incomplete or missing data in one database, which featured as another.
- Complicated database to navigate, resulting in poor user adoption.
- Inability to use the database to their advantage.
Objective
Clarks needed to increase efficiency and they recognised that using an address lookup service would overcome their checkout challenges, and that creating one master database and standardising their invoices would remove the complications associated with data silos.pp
Solution
Clarks contacted Data8 and following Clarks’ selection process and successful strategy meetings, Postcode Lookup was integrated into their checkout systems across the UK.
The integrations have delivered a number of key benefits:
- A long term solution providing real-time address validation to meet Clarks’ ongoing business needs.
- Capture of accurate customer data in a consistent structure at the point of capture.
- Simple to use solution which easily integrated into Clarks’ systems.
- Improved communications leading to increased customer satisfaction.
- Confidence in an easily-maintained and accurate solution.
- Built-up a strong, long-lasting relationship.
Furthermore, Data8 extracted the invoice data from the number of databases and using standardisation technology, organised it in a way that would be useful for Clarks. It was then loaded back into Clarks’ systems with the new standardisation and formatting. This provided benefits such as:
- A uniform database which is easy to understand.
- The ability to analyse and gain accurate business insights from a financial point of view.
