Calor

Calor is the UK’s largest LPG supplier to domestic and commercial businesses and has diversified activities across retailing, bulk gas, appliances, and a range of services for its various markets. Understanding and communicating with these different markets required integrating other data sources, web information and external industry data.

Calor’s existing system that was no longer fit for purpose and Calor needed to use this new solution to generate timely, accurate and actionable business insight. This would enable Calor to conduct campaign work, including digital integrations with email web services for billing, staff loyalty, and home energy checks.

Adroit carried out a process of detailed business and requirements analysis with critical stakeholders of the solution at Calor. Adroit then developed a SQL-based Customer Data Platform which takes daily feeds from numerous customer management database, service delivery and billing systems linking records together through a set of sophisticated business rules.

External datasets containing non-mains gas definitions, energy savings data and other market segmentations are also imported and maintained. The Customer Data Platform (SCV) is structured to cope with business and household customers and is hosted and supported by Adroit, a Class 1 Data centre.  The dataset is made available to users through the Apteco Marketing Suite, the DotDigital platform and bespoke web applications.

As part of the Customer Data Platform project, Calor migrated from its existing email service provision to a more advanced email service provider DotDigital. This change supported triggered communications and integrated with their e-commerce Magento platform.

There was a requirement to record all the email communications within a Customer Data Platform. Additionally, it was possible to record all email outcomes and interactions such as clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes.

Adroit developed an API integration between the Customer Data Platform and DotDigital to provide almost real-time feedback into the Customer Data Platform. The FastStats/DotDigital Integration allows Calor to create email campaign selections directly from FastStats as required and manage permissions in line with GDPR.

Calor had the requirement that there was a two-way integration between a variety of web service, including Calor Account Online (A customer-facing account management app) and Bullseye (An internal prospect information gathering system, with a staff loyalty payment). Adroit set about re-developing the web apps on the new hosting system, taking the opportunity to develop new features and future-proofing the applications. These web apps were designed with the Single Customer View in mind.

As a result, the web apps were optimised to produce results quickly and allowed users to update details within the Single Customer View quickly.  Data validation rules applied.

In addition to the two web services requiring to be re-developed, the single customer view also had to integrate with the Magento E-commerce Platform. Adroit developed an API to take the customer data and web sales activity from Magento and into the Single Customer View.

A key requirement of the new solution was that data was accessible for interrogation by both non-technical users and skilled analysts alike in a way which was quick and intuitive. Apteco’s FastStats Discoverer solution was selected as an appropriate system. Adroit designed and implemented a FastStats system which represented the Calor data structure in a sensible and logical way.

This allowed users to gain strategic insight out of the system with ease. It also significantly improved efficiency as previous queries and reports which took several minutes to run were returned within seconds, allowing users to keep “train of thought” whilst investigating data problems and queries.