Tapestry Personalizes Omnichannel Customer Experiences with Amperity and AWS

Tapestry, a global house of luxury and lifestyle brands, including Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman, faced a customer data dilemma. They didn’t lack consumer interest or purchases. However, there were challenges with collecting customer data in a useful form and having data scattered across different silos. Tapestry also needed effective identity resolution to answer its growing demand for personalization from its customers, so it could properly target promotions to specific customer segments.

Here’s where Amperity, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) came in. Amperity, a leading enterprise customer data platform (CDP) used by brands worldwide, enabled Tapestry to take control of its customer data to systematically improve customer relationships, deliver better personalization, and foster brand loyalty.

In March 2020, Tapestry launched its transformation management office (TMO), to drive change across the company and its brands and leverage data and new ways of working to drive growth. First, they had to consolidate their historical customer data which was scattered across its companies in multiple sources such as point of sale (POS), ecommerce, email interactions, loyalty data, mobile app engagement, and more. Tapestry also needed to build integration plans for their current data feeds which were produced every day when customers interacted with their brands.

Along with the disparate data silos, there were inconsistencies in individual customer data. Tapestry consistently found that customers identified themselves differently in different places (using a full name in one place and a nickname in another). Customers sometimes entered a typo when updating their information. Tapestry’s frequent customers were more likely to have inconsistent and inaccurate personal identifiable information (PII), because they interacted with the brands more often, opening the door to potentially messier data. And, as people moved through life, they had different emails, changed phone numbers, relocated to new places, or even changed their names.

To achieve a single customer view, Tapestry would have to build, maintain, and monitor data pipes into and out of a centralized system to bring information together from disparate systems. Plus, most systems — like ecommerce, loyalty, mobile, and point of sale — weren’t designed to integrate with each other.

They did not share the same identifiers, so it was difficult for Tapestry to align customers consistently. Tapestry needed a way to gain a single view of their customers that included all of their necessary information: who they are, what they purchase, and the ways they interacted with Tapestry’s different businesses.

Tapestry called upon Amperity to enable it to identify the same customer within and across all of the company’s data sources that contained customer information. Working with Amperity’s Customer Data Platform, which is powered by Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Kinesis, the company created a first-party data foundation. This ultimately enabled Tapestry to deliver fully integrated, innovative customer experiences, and drive deeper engagement among high-value customers.

By adopting this new technology, Tapestry saw immediate improvement in the automation of data files required for various vendors, especially automated email providers. The legacy tool used for this was highly manual. The adoption of Amperity allowed automation and end-to-end delivery of files, saving hours of effort each week, which was time reinvested in other growth-driving opportunities.

One area of immediate improvement was the automation of data files required for various vendors, especially automated email providers. The legacy tool used for this was highly manual. The adoption of Amperity allowed automation and end-to-end delivery of files, saving hours of effort each week, which was time reinvested in other growth-driving opportunities.

Amperity’s proprietary machine-learning (ML) algorithms matches records, which improves match rates and accuracy over time, even when unique identifiers are incomplete, inconsistent, or unavailable, while probabilistic data linking allowed human-like logic to catch inconsistencies that more rigid matching schemas couldn’t process. This created an accurate and up-to-date 360-degree view of the customer that would enable Tapestry to deliver omnichannel experiences. It also democratized access to data for marketers and analysts. Amperity enables dashboards that highlight core KPIs and statistics, such as the split of new customers and their product lifetime value, repeat, and win-back purchasing behavior, plus many other dimensions to splice the data by channel, retail outlet, and other variables.

By having a clear identity for each customer, Tapestry was able to generate insights on each and every customer. This, in turn, enabled the company to activate strong cross-channel strategies that dramatically improved its customer communications and engagement. Messages can now be properly personalized, meaning no more repetitive or inconsistent communication. Uncovering these business-critical insights about customers is driving value across the Tapestry organization. Now, Tapestry can speak to its customers at an individual level, boosting customer loyalty and increasing lifetime value.