smartFOCUS, a European-headquartered vendor of Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) software, has been selected by Harrods to provide software and services to help with its customer data management. Consultancy has been provided partly in preparation for Harrods’ recently launched loyalty programme called Harrods Rewards.

Harrods is the world’s most famous and luxurious department store and has over one million square feet of retail space spread over its seven floors. The company also sells online via www.harrods.com, and has a direct mail operation and several airport outlets.

To improve the customisation of its promotions, Harrods worked with smartFOCUS to introduce a single customer view and a suite of marketing-friendly tools for analysing and creating campaigns.

“We want to better understand our customers’ purchase behaviour so that we can send them personalised marketing offers,” said Jose Majluf, CRM manager for Harrods. “We don’t want to use a ‘one size fits all’ approach to marketing any more, but want instead to increase the number of differentiated marketing messages we send out. We strive to provide better service, and want to improve the relevance of the offers we send customers. This will also generate higher response rates and make our marketing activities more profitable.”

He adds: “We chose smartFOCUS because it offered us the functionality we need in retail and has an easy-to-use interface. We will use the single customer view database as the backbone for our new loyalty programme, integrating it with point of sale, the customer database, the online platform and with our loyalty software.”

smartFOCUS is providing consultancy to help Harrods specify and design a data quality processing routine to clean, standardise and de-duplicate customer data from a range of sources across the business. The company is also offering consultancy to help Harrods to introduce an Oracle Single Customer View database. The smartFOCUS Intelligent Marketing™ solution will be enabling analysis and visualisation of data, profiling and statistical modelling, campaign planning and execution, and report production and distribution.