How Simply Business achieves a seamless, cross-channel user experience with Snowplow

Background

Simply Business is the UK’s leading insurance broker for small businesses, with over 400,000 businesses and landlords protected through them. They have an award-winning claims service and get great customer feedback, and are recognized across the industry as a technology and data innovator.

Even back in 2015 they were doing great things with data. At the Data, Analytics & Technology Awards for Insurance, Simply Business beat the big players in winning the Business Intelligence Project of the Year for a system called Aerie (Analytic Event Recording for Insight and Exploration). Yet, despite being a data-driven company, they still faced challenges.

Data’s at the heart of everything we do—from product improvements to how we shape the future of the company.”

STEWART DUNCAN | DIRECTOR OF DATA SCIENCE AT SIMPLY BUSINESS

Challenges

Simply Business engages with customers through a variety of channels, including PPC, affiliate and other digital marketing channels; their website; phone (via a large call center); and email. Their previous systems—Google Analytics and Omniture—made it impossible to create a single customer view across all channels. Simply Business had no way of knowing their customers, what they were trying to accomplish, and how well the business served those needs at different points in the journey.

Another challenge was the lack of data ownership. For a data-driven company like Simply Business, it was important to have access to the underlying data to understand customer journey issues at an individual customer level.

And, finally, data processing was too slow to action. Simply Business wanted the ability to intervene in customer journeys to better serve their users. They needed the ability to process data in real time; and use the insights to enhance the customer experience on the website and help call center staff who were assisting existing and prospective customers.

Solution

With Snowplow, Simply Business can do much more than just web analytics. They have joined up different data streams to create a unified view of the customers and the business.

With Snowplow, Simply Business can identify the individual paths taken by users, the channels they interacted with, the frequency of contacts, and whether that process led to a purchase. With this information, they can accurately measure the influence each channel has on the conversion funnel and the return on advertising spend. They’ve built a multi-channel attribution model on top of the data Snowplow creates, illuminating the impact of different channels on helping users through different parts of the purchase funnel. They are using these insights to optimize the allocation of marketing spend.

Simply Business has also built an A/B testing framework so that updates to their website can be rigorously tested before being rolled out. This ensures that the regular updates to the website lead to sustained and systematic improvement in customer experience and revenue growth over time. As well as A/B testing, they are also personalizing the website experience using real-time behavioral data.

Finally, to prioritize which prospective customers get outbound calls first (and targeted on via other customer-specific channels), Simply Business has built a lead scoring model using data created with Snowplow. They analyze engagement levels and model the data to generate a probability of conversion on a lead-by-lead basis. Using Snowplow’s real-time pipeline, Simply Business also gives call center staff detailed, up-to-the-minute data about who the prospect is, what actions they’ve taken on the website, and what product they’re interested in.

Pretty much everyone at Simply Business uses Snowplow, especially the product development team. They use it continuously, every day, to analyze the user journey and question set. Even the core metrics we use for our management reporting at board level are aggregations from the Snowplow data.”

STEWART DUNCAN | DIRECTOR OF DATA SCIENCE AT SIMPLY BUSINESS

Results

The Simply Business team were surprised by how fast they were able to build on top of Snowplow and use the data to deliver real business value. They now have  a clear, unified view of the customer journey, which the marketing team can use to build, test and enhance seamless cross-channel experiences that optimize conversions. What’s more, Snowplow’s data integration with Zendesk empowers call center staff to improve customer service and ultimately close more deals.

How you can get started with Snowplow

To learn more about how Snowplow can empower your organization with behavioral data creation, book in a chat with our team today. Alternatively, Try Snowplow is our free, easy-to-use version of our technology, which allows you to create your own behavioral data in under 30 mins.

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