For today’s interview, Ruth Thomson, Practice Lead for Strategic Advice spoke to Catherine Gamble, Data Scientist at Marks and Spencer.

Catherine is presenting “Using R to Drive Revenue for your Online Business” at EARL London and we got the chance to get a preview of the use case she’ll be presenting.

Thanks Catherine for this interview. What was the business need or opportunity that led to this project?

As an online retailer, we know that the actions we take, for example, any changes we make to our website, have an impact on our financial results. However, when multiple changes are being made or campaigns are being run at the same time, it can be hard to separate which action led to the desired result.

From a strategy and planning perspective, we knew it would be valuable to be able to predict the direct impact of any actions we took, before we made them.

How did you go about solving this problem?

I developed a predictive model to explore the relationships between action and result. The result was I was able to identify which actions would have an impact on our KPIs.

What value did your project deliver?

We now have clear insight which is fed into our strategic decision making. As a result, we have had a positive impact on our KPIs and there has been a positive financial impact.

What would you say were the elements that made your project a success?

Support from the Team – one of the key drivers of success in this project was the time I was given to explore different techniques and models and to learn.

Curiosity – this project came about because I was curious about the patterns in the data and wanted to explore some questions around things we were seeing.

What other businesses do you think would benefit from this use case?

Any online retailer who have multiple sales, marketing and development events and campaigns at the same time.

It would also be useful for businesses who have a sales funnel and want to explore how the actions businesses take impact on the results.

To hear Catherine’s full talk and others like it – join us at EARL London this September!