Your expert for questions
Mathias Elsässer
Partner, Customer Transformation
PwC Germany
Tel: +49 175 5158588
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Mercedes-Benz AG is one of the leading global suppliers of premium and luxury cars and vans. The company aims to service its customers from the first moment of contact. As their marketing activities rely on third-party cookies, they are faced with the challenge of preparing for a cookieless world while ensuring that marketing efficiency remains high and that their customer experience remains luxurious. To achieve this goal, data siloes need to be bridged and a future-proof marketing ecosystem must be built. To provide a comprehensive 360° view of their customers, Mercedes-Benz AG needs to move beyond a single-channel vantage point and integrate data from multiple systems. This will make it possible to construct a unified customer profile to understand customer affinities and interact with customers based on their needs and preferences.
Mercedes-Benz AG specified the target of building a data-driven OneExperiencePlatform. PwC has thus assisted in building a future-proof marketing ecosystem in order to deliver unique customer experiences. To create a OneExperiencePlatform, PwC embedded the Salesforce Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Marketing Cloud Personalisation (MC Personalisation) as the central marketing platforms in order to consolidate all customers’ activities and thus deliver personalised and connected experiences across channels.
PwC treats technology as an enabler for driving business value while retaining a focus on the customer experience. To build and scale the platforms, PwC used its proven rollout and enablement approach.
In the first phase, initialisation, PwC assessed the status quo and drew up a business case to determine the strategic value as well as the costs involved. Along with the business case, PwC performed a tech assessment to understand the existing data and technology landscape, ensured it had the right understanding of existing products, assessed data quality and defined business and technical requirements.
The second step, piloting, aimed to validate the business value of the MC Personalisation and CDP pilot.
During the pilot, PwC considered the following points:
The pilot phase is followed by the rollout phase, which aims to scale the successful implementation and use cases up to a global level. In this phase, the global implementation of the platform and activation of the use cases were performed using a dedicated rollout concept. At the same time, PwC designed and conducted a business enablement program to carry over the change process. In addition to designing and implementing the CDP and MC Personalisation, PwC made it a priority to align the teams with a view to building one marketing engine based on two systems. Therefore, PwC specified frequent synchronisation cycles and ensured transparency based on the sharing of knowledge, processes and progress.
The final phase included implementation of its operation and governance. Deriving lessons learned to be fed back to the rollout team created a continuous agile cycle of improvements, insights and new use cases, which were in turn piloted and rolled out.
A single source of truth was established in order to merge customer information from multiple systems into a single record and thus prepare for a cookieless world. This has enhanced the capability of Mercedes-Benz AG to target its customers effectively and improve marketing efficiency. Based on a unified profile and the new insights, customers’ engagement across all touchpoints with the brand are highly personalised.
In detailed terms, the following results were achieved:
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