Large volumes of transactional data across a significant retail estate

As a partnership with a consultancy, we were providing the technical capabilities behind the data collection. However, this did not stop us providing support with all aspects of the research. Team members visited a selection of stores to get a feel for the customer journey first-hand. We used our extensive experience of working with the Partnership to ensure a seamless tone of voice and look & feel of the customer contact emails between the brand's touchpoints.

Aware that the respondents who completed our survey would be less research-savvy, we provided a dedicated customer support channel. The support team had an extremely high success rate of addressing any customer issues on the survey platform. They also managed customer journey issues and were able to escalate customers to the correct John Lewis department to rectify any complaints. This helped to make the customers feel heard.

Due to the scope of the research, continuously managing a large volume of customer transaction data was always going to be key. Having mapped out the process, we designed a custom built SQL database to store and process the transactional data. With 200k of additional transactions uploaded each month, we also tracked store response rates to aid the generation of daily email list for a spread of sample across the estate - with send out rates specific to each store, maintaining a 90 day exclusion period.

Above all we were able to provide a consultancy partnership, with flawlessly accurate monthly data, very few customer issues, in a format that made outputs more efficient to share. This included a feed to the end client of ongoing verbatim content for use at a store level. We were able to grow the partnership from an initial 15 months to almost 3 years. This research was also used to measure in-store trials in a small subset of the estate, before rollout wider.