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Syntasa

Customer story · Retail & eCommerce

3× add-to-basket rates, with bundles built for each shopper.

Currys, formerly Dixons Carphone, used Syntasa inside its own Google Cloud to put personalized product bundles on its websites in real time, from start to production in 12 weeks.

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Results

Proven results in weeks, not years.

  • Add-to-basket3×more likely to add to basket when shown personalized bundles
  • Product coverage72%of product views now show a bundle, up from 32% with manual bundling
  • Bundle performance1.3×better than manually created bundles, even for shoppers with little history
  • Time to production12 weeksfrom start to recommendations live on the website

Context

An in-store expert, on every product page.

Currys is a leading omnichannel retailer of technology products and services, with brands including Currys PC World and Carphone Warehouse, and the market leader in the UK & Ireland.

In its stores, sales staff suggest the things that go with a purchase: a case for a laptop, an HDMI cable for a large-screen TV. Online, bundles were set up by hand on commercial grounds, and their uptake lagged the stores. As customers moved online, add-on sales, a key driver of profitability, were at stake.

The eCommerce team wanted the same journey online, with bundles personalized to each shopper and served in real time to drive incremental sales and margin.

The constraint

Manual bundles, and data that wasn't ready.

  1. Bundles were built by handThe merchandising team set up a bundle for every product and every add-on, with no personalization.
  2. Models stuck in the labThe data science team had models, but no way to put them into production on the website.
  3. Clickstream data was hard to useAdobe Analytics data was not in a shape for analysis at the level of one customer, and there was no large data engineering team.
  4. Traffic peaks were extremeVolumes rise as much as 10× on days like Black Friday and Boxing Day, so the models had to scale with demand.
  5. Data had to stay in placeEverything ran inside Currys' own Google Cloud, with no third-party copy of the customer data.

Deployment

From clickstream to the basket.

Part of Currys' Supercharge Attach project, built with the data science team in the eCommerce department.

  1. Step 1: Architect the data

    Syntasa plugged natively into Currys' existing technology and Google Cloud, turning Adobe Analytics clickstream into tables ready for analysis from day one.

  2. Step 2: Personalize every bundle

    Models built on that data choose the add-ons each shopper is most likely to want, as they browse.

  3. Step 3: Serve in real time, at peak

    Personalized bundles appear on product pages and in the basket on the Currys PC World sites, scaling with traffic on the busiest trading days.

“One benefit for having Syntasa was in the architecture of the schema, so that once you've deployed the tool, you've instantly got those architected tables that are ready and available for analysis straight away.”

Chris Ward, former Ecommerce Insight Manager, Dixons Carphone

Outcome

What changed for the business.

  • Personalized bundles that convert

    Shoppers shown AI-driven bundles are three times more likely to add the product to their basket.

  • Bundles on most product pages

    Coverage rose from 32% of product views with manual bundling to 72% with automated, personalized bundles.

  • Models wired into every channel

    Modeling outcomes now flow to the websites, optimization tools and CRM, from one big data environment.

  • Best Use of AI

    The work won Best Use of AI at the eCommerce Awards in London in 2019.

“We wanted to offer bundles to customers that were personalized, based on previous behavior and similar customers. Syntasa was the only tool that could activate in real time on the website to change the experience for the customer.”

Paula Bobbett, Head of Online Performance, Currys

What came next

From one use case to enterprise personalization.

The bundles were the start. Currys has since taken the same data and models across the homepage, new product launches and every marketing channel.

  • A personalized homepage

    The same data and models now personalize the Currys homepage for returning visitors.

  • Recommendations for new products

    New product launches get bundle recommendations from day one, not weeks later.

  • One customer view, every channel

    A Customer 360 with tens of millions of Golden Records and hundreds of audience segments, shared across CRM, paid search and paid social.

    Tens of millions of profiles

  • Real-time cart recovery

    In-session models that recover abandoned carts while the shopper is still on the site, worth tens of millions of pounds in revenue.

    Tens of millions recovered

“Syntasa's Audiences was pivotal in supporting Currys' transition towards first-party audiences. The goal was to maintain consistent experiences for the same audiences across website, CRM and digital marketing channels. Over the years, we've continuously integrated more data points, models, and destinations to enhance our marketing efforts.”

Tammy Chang, former eCommerce Senior Analytics & Personalization Manager, Currys

FAQ

Questions teams ask first.

Resources

Hear it from the Currys team.

Case study · PDF · 4 pages

Read the full Currys story.

The full story, with the architecture, how it works, a timeline and the detailed results.

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