More than 100 legacy systems held around 130 million customer records. That’s more than three times the adult population of the UK, which may sound impressive – until you realize there was no easy way to pull together all the data across the platforms. 

Boots UK worked with UST to create Single View of the Customer (SVoC), collating these records into 60 million composite records or “golden views” of the customer. With all the vital information at their fingertips, Boots UK teams can now provide a more joined-up customer experience and more targeted, effective marketing.

And that was just the start. With the need to meet GDPR in 2020, it became clear that Boots UK lacked a single, company-wide marketing consent for customers. Customers were asked for their preferences in every different channel, and their choices were an inconsistent jumble of consents across systems. This led to customers being inappropriately marketed to, customer complaints and even Data Protection Officer investigations. There was often a lack of joined-up thinking in how a Boots customer was considered digitally.

With the latest release of the solution, all customer consents across all systems were migrated into SVoC against the customer golden views. The wording presented to customers to obtain their marketing preferences became centrally managed and distributed out to customer interaction points.

Boots UK can now market to customers with confidence that it is working on the latest consent; with the knowledge that customers can provide their consent in just one place, and that it will be consistently used across the group. On the rare occasions that complaints arise, Boots UK has the evidence to know what happened and to be confident in its actions. 

Boots UK now has 1.9 billion data items captured and understood for marketing purposes and can run customer interactions against this data in half the speed it used to.