At Winn-Dixie, data management has become increasingly important to daily operations and marketing strategies. Collecting, maintaining, understanding and using customer data are some keys to our success. True data management begins with the simplest of steps—baby steps, if you will. With Teradata Customer Relationship Management, the collected data can benefit the tiniest of our customers.

Cathy Duby is electronic marketing specialist at Winn-Dixie, where she oversees the company�s innovative Baby Club program.

The Winn-Dixie Baby Club provides benefits to customers who are expecting or who have children under the age of two. Through this ideal channel, we can serve and reward loyal shoppers celebrating the most exciting time in their lives—having a baby.

Baby Club members accumulate points for every dollar spent on baby products at Winn-Dixie. These points can be redeemed for discounts on groceries. Additional Baby Club programs include gifts sent via direct mail, in-store coupons issued at point of sale (POS), special promotions and pharmacy programs.

To maximize the relevance and value of communications and offers, it is important to know these special customers and understand their needs. Using the data collected when they enroll in the Baby Club and analyzing their behavior at POS and through their feedback to our Customer Call Center are vital to the efficient and effective management of the program. With Teradata Customer Relationship Management, data on Baby Club members can be accumulated and analyzed to offer the best service based on their needs.

Walk before you run
Data that is collected when customers join the program is paramount to understanding Baby Club members. Customers can enroll online, through the Customer Call Center or by submitting an application at one of 520 Winn-Dixie stores. Getting this information into our data warehouse requires a consolidated effort by the data entry and IT teams. The data is fed every day into the Teradata Database via automated extract, transform and load (ETL) scripts.

Enrollment reports are then run daily to help identify any anomalies that may have occurred during data entry and IT processing of feeds and updates. They are also used as an alert to potential concerns, such as unexplained decreases in enrollment, or to monitor expected enrollment increases after specific promotions. Additionally, these reports are used to proactively target customers who did not completely fill out the enrollment form with required information.

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Sure footing
Designing and building programs to serve Baby Club members is the next step to effectively using the accumulated data. We have developed many programs and promotions for our members, both in a global, club-wide approach and on a more individual level. These programs take into consideration customers' spending levels, their children's age, products that they purchase or don't purchase, etc.

Several Teradata Customer Relationship Management modules help control various aspects of the program:

	Communication Manager. From a contact-management perspective and for general segmentation purposes, Communication Manager enables queries to the data warehouse with specific targeting criteria. In one easy process, we can determine which households qualify to specifications, hold control groups based on certain criteria, clip the club membership to desired quantities and generate output files. Furthermore, by setting up recurring communications and floating dates, the most recently enrolled club members and those who are reaching important milestones can be targeted biweekly, without the need to conduct any manual procedures each time. (See figure 1, right.) For example, with Teradata Customer Relationship Management, a communication can be set up that will capture all members who have enrolled within a specific time frame, typically from one day to 14 days from date run. Scheduling recurring jobs frees up many hours of set-up time, and the mail output list is updated and available exactly when needed.
	Personalization Rules. Every two weeks, customers whose children have upcoming first birthdays are sent personalized birthday greetings. To seamlessly accomplish this task, the Personalization Rules module biweekly runs the necessary SQL statements that write the pertinent data to a physical table. The resulting table is then queried and the personalized list is delivered to our mailhouse. (See figure 2, right.) Personalization Rules offers these solutions: Scheduling jobs to recur is simple. This feature saves time by eliminating the need to manually monitor customer correspondence lists. Only qualifying child rows are returned. This means sending a personalized message only to the child or children who will soon be turning one in families with multiple children.
	Cross-Segment Analysis. To better understand the purchasing habits of Baby Club members, the Cross-Segment Analysis runs periodic, recurring analyses based on children's ages and specific data elements such as household count, dollars spent, trips made, units purchased, etc. In the report template, both axes return category-level data. (See figure 3, right.) This report is then run against varying universes of club members. The results are automatically exported to a spreadsheet template and updated. (See figure 4, right.) The spreadsheet highlights, for instance, the products parents of particular age groups are purchasing, as well as the important category voids (e.g., buying formula but not diapers). It breaks down by age group the shopping frequency and spending in baby categories (diapers, food, formula, wipes, accessories, and health and beauty care), and the number of households that purchase in one category and not another. From this information, the marketing plan can focus on specific customer groups.
	SQL Assistant. The coupon offers included in various programs constantly change and are fine-tuned based on the coupon redemption rate—which is a true indicator of the customer's perception of a coupon's value. To track coupon redemption, Teradata SQL Assistant is run with custom SQL.

A macro is used to determine which households were valid members of the Baby Club during any given fiscal week falling between a defined range of dates. Validity is based on enrollment date, age of baby and membership expiration date (when the baby turns two). This data is written to the physical table CRM_TEAM.VALID_HOUSEHOLD_BABY_CLUB and joined to analyze the purchasing behavior of valid members during specific fiscal weeks. Below is the underlying logic of the macro:

DELETE
FROM crm_team.valid_household_baby_club;

INSERT INTO crm_team.valid_household_baby_club
(Household_Num
 ,Fsc_Wk_Id
 ,Fsc_Wk_Bgn_Dt
 ,Fsc_Wk_End_Dt
)
SELECT UNIQUE x1.hh_id
     ,Fsc_Wk_Id
     ,Fsc_Wk_Bgn_Dt
     ,Fsc_Wk_End_Dt
FROM user_view.cust_rwrd_clb r1
INNER JOIN user_view.crc_household_xref_crnt x1
     ON r1.CRC_Id=x1.CRC_Id
INNER JOIN user_view.bv_fsc_wk fw
     ON fw.Fsc_Wk_End_Dt >= '2004-09-01'
     AND fw.Fsc_Wk_End_Dt < '2008-03-06'
     AND r1.Rwrd_Clb_Id=1
     AND (r1.Eff_Bgn_Dt,r1.Eff_End_Dt)
OVERLAPS (fw.Fsc_Wk_Bgn_Dt,fw.Fsc_Wk_End_Dt)
INNER JOIN user_view.cust_chld cc
     ON r1.crc_id = cc.crc_id
     AND cc.Brth_Dt BETWEEN fw.Fsc_Wk_Bgn_Dt-731
     AND fw.Fsc_Wk_End_Dt+273;
	
COLLECT STATS
     ON crm_team.valid_household_baby_club
     INDEX (Household_Num);
COLLECT STATS
     ON crm_team.valid_household_baby_club
     INDEX (Household_Num, Fsc_Wk_End_Dt);
COLLECT STATS
     ON crm_team.valid_household_baby_club
     COLUMN Fsc_Wk_Bgn_Dt;
COLLECT STATS
     ON crm_team.valid_household_baby_club
     COLUMN Fsc_Wk_Id;

A macro is also used to enroll as lifetime club members those customers whose children have special needs.

Off and running
It is easy to get overwhelmed with the amount of data across the enterprise, and sometimes it is difficult to know where to begin. Our advice at Winn-Dixie is to begin data management with baby steps. The wealth of knowledge obtained by collecting, maintaining and using the data in a Teradata system will permit even the smallest bits of data to get a lot of attention.

The valuable and user-friendly Teradata tools and programs we use make the responsibility of serving our tiniest customers an enjoyable and rewarding effort. The better we understand and serve this next generation of loyal Winn-Dixie shoppers, the more prosperous our future will be. T

Cathy Duby has worked at Winn-Dixie for about eight years as communications manager, training manager and, currently, electronic marketing specialist.

Photography by Ryan Kettermen

Teradata Magazine-September 2008