How our in-house Customer Data Platform is elevating JET’s Customer Experience

At Just Eat Takeaway.com (JET), we are constantly witnessing rapid changes in customer behavior, motivations, and attitudes — especially given the scale of our business and the different geographical locations where we are active.

As a data analyst in the Customer and Marketing Analytics team, within the dynamic Data and Analytics community (DNA), I would like to showcase to you today how our in-house Customer Data Platform (CDP) is creating a unified customer profile that provides a 360-degree view of each of our customer’s interactions. This in turn empowers various marketing and product teams within JET to better understand the overall behavior of our customers, and improve them.

Fuelling business with CDP’s data as a product

Our Customer Data Platform (CDP) has evolved with over 3+ years of real-world use cases. What started as a mere data store, has eventually grown into a fully functioning platform with capabilities of regularly ingesting, transforming, and egressing relevant information onto a variety of platforms.

We manage an extensive volume of customer data within our in-house CDP, empowered by Google BigQuery, which is currently refreshed at regular intervals. To give you a sense of scale, our database storage size is currently estimated to be around 3 TB, highlighting the depth and breadth of insights it provides to drive personalized experiences and strategic decision-making.

Continuous feedback from teams has helped shape the platform's capabilities, ensuring that it caters to appropriate data governance standards. At JET, ensuring the integrity of customer data usage is our top priority. We ensure we are adhering to strict standards that prioritize the use of data by staying up-to-date with legislation in the markets we are active in to ensure the data is used in accordance with active regulations.

Our CDP capabilities

Our CDP capabilities

We source all the data for our CDP from multiple Data Systems.

At the heart of our CDP lies customer information aggregated from various sources like our databases, website analytics, CRM platforms, etc. By bringing data from all these sources together in a centralized place we ensure interoperability and governance by eliminating the need for business stakeholders to access raw or intermediate data from different channels and platforms.

We, in the DNA team, ensure our data management practices adhere strictly to the regulations outlined in applicable regulations including those containing rules for the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data, such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and non-European equivalents for all of our data systems. This means that every aspect of our data handling — right from collection to processing and storage — is handled per applicable regulatory requirements to safeguard the privacy and security of our customers. Our data protection measures include ensuring full transparency in our data processing processes, and we — where relevant — use only the customer data for which appropriate levels of consent have been provided.

Implementing a comprehensive monitoring framework to oversee CDP processes.

We have configured a comprehensive framework of alerts and notifications within our monitoring system to alert relevant stakeholders of any critical issues and performance deviations.

• Performance metrics, such as tracking pipeline processing times and latency, give us a fair proactive insight into our data ingestion or transformation efficiency. Analyzing trends of this over time also gives us a fair understanding of bottlenecks and areas of optimization.
• Similarly, data quality metrics like data availability, freshness, and distribution are tracked routinely with the help of a comprehensive set of tests and data governance team-provided frameworks after each pipeline stage, ensuring data reliability.
• Additionally, we ensure that we are optimizing our resources effectively while we are handling large amounts of data while keeping a continuous overview of cost metrics like data processing and storage costs, etc.

We can vouch that creating a structured approach to establish and monitor metrics for your data products is super effective. Keeping an eye on them regularly helps improve and optimize systems continuously, getting the most out of your data.

Enhancing data awareness within the CDP through the integration of external tools.

We’re also facilitating greater data understanding among business stakeholders by leveraging metadata and advanced data visualization tools such as Datahub and Tableau.

• Metadata tools like DataHub provide valuable contextual information about the data, including its source, structure, descriptions, and lineage, aiding stakeholders in comprehending the data more effectively.
• Moreover, data visualization tools like Tableau allow stakeholders to interact with data intuitively, presenting our underlying CDP data in visually appealing formats. Through interactive dashboards and charts, stakeholders can explore and analyze data, and uncover patterns and insights to make informed decisions.

Why do our business teams love CDP?

We centralize a variety of customer definitions, to accommodate diverse business use cases within CDP.

We understand that our customers are constantly evolving, becoming more aware of their options and exploring different choices. This means that different teams within our company may have different understandings about who a JET customer is. However, our robust data unification processes ensure that every piece of customer data is integrated seamlessly into each customer definition, regardless of the source. This approach enriches the depth of insights that can be derived from each customer definition. Rest assured that we are committed to providing our customers with the best possible service, and our data-driven approach ensures that we can tailor our services to meet their needs.

For instance, based on a combination of a variety of zero-party and first-party data, we try to deduplicate and obtain a single customer view. This comprehensive, unified representation of an individual customer’s interactions provides businesses with a more accurate representation of a customer. We can now drive more tailored experiences across all touchpoints — website visits, order transactions, social media interactions, customer support inquiries, and marketing engagement, irrespective of what email the customer uses for ordering.

Here are some instances where the single customer view can empower business:

1. Streamline customer incentive programs (e.g. vouchers) to maximize cost savings.
2. Better insights into the quality of marketing activities on customer acquisition and reactivation

Unlocking unified customer journeys with our CDP: Bidding Farewell to Fragmented Data

A customer journey is defined as the complete sum of experiences for a customer when interacting with our product across the funnel, right from awareness to placing an order and beyond. Within our CDP, we have implemented the procedure of linking and harmonizing multiple identifiers or attributes associated with a customer definition across different devices.

The JET customer journey comprises the following 3 flows mainly:

1. Beginning with the customer activation flow, our journey dataset delves into the initial stages of customer engagement, examining the pathways through which individuals transition from prospects to active users. By analyzing touch points such as website visits, we discern patterns and behaviors that signal the activation of customers, enabling us to refine onboarding processes and enhance user experiences.
2. This is followed by the order flow which entails dissecting customer interactions with product pages, shopping carts, and checkout processes to identify user behavior.
3. Moreover, a customer journey extends beyond a mere transaction, which is what we call the post-order flow. Metrics such as customer and product satisfaction scores and product/order reviews provide valuable insights into the contentment levels of our customers with our product and services.

Our CDP enables JET to harness the power of Customer Segmentation.

Our CDP facilitates an improved understanding of customers by discerning unique behavioral patterns and preferences, thereby enabling targeted personalization and tailored communication strategies.

Data analysts and scientists leverage the first-party interaction data and create machine-learning models to help understand customer behavior. This includes intelligent segmentation techniques, such as the categorization of customers based on their spending habits or scoring customer’s willingness to explore and try new or unfamiliar types of foods and cuisines based on machine learning models.

These types of insights enable us to offer our customers a more varied and engaging experience and potentially attract them to newer offerings.

The marketing teams collaborate to apply these segments across multiple platforms, such as Braze and Salesforce, to send the right content to the customer at the right time. This includes tailoring communications, such as emails and push notifications, to better resonate with individual customers.

Ensuring Data Accessibility with CDP Egress: Putting Marketing Team in Control

Our CDP serves as the backbone of our marketing teams, enabling seamless integration and utilization of relevant customer data across any marketing platform — whether it’s optimizing ad targeting, crafting personalized email campaigns, or refining social media strategies. The standout feature of our CDP Egress is its self-service capability — marketers can set up their campaigns without much developer intervention. This is empowered by numerous templates that internally translate to data pipelines being created automatically for the following capabilities:

1. Audience Selection: Empowering marketers to choose the right customers for their campaigns by leveraging CDP data. For instance, we would like to highlight pizza offers running on JET to engage our pizza-loving customers.
2. Attribute Customization: Enabling marketers to pinpoint specific attributes of their selected audience, ensuring tailored messaging and offers.
3. Flexible Data Routing: This allows marketers to effortlessly determine where the data should flow, ensuring it reaches the desired marketing platforms. For instance trying to reengage our pizza-loving customers who have come to our platform today but have not placed an order yet.
4. Strategic Timing: Equipping marketers with the ability to schedule data transfers at optimal times for maximum impact and relevance.
5. Consent Management: Providing clarity on customer consent levels, ensuring compliance and ethical data usage in all communications efforts.

Conclusion

In conclusion, our CDP marks the beginning of an exciting journey toward data-driven innovation and enriched customer interactions. As we continue to leverage the platform, we in the DNA team are embracing a culture of continuous learning and improvements with valuable inputs from our business stakeholders. With each new use case, our CDP grows stronger in the capabilities it offers — deepening its impact on improving customer experience.

In our upcoming blog posts, we’ll delve deeper into how we tailored the self-service features of our CDP specifically for marketing teams.

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