Case Study

Blue Light Card

Hindsight to Foresight: Blue Light Card

Renewals target increase from -14% to +7% of target.

77 cross-function reports built across 12 themes.

50% of the business now uses Tableau.

About

Providing a discount service to emergency service workers, Blue Light Card (BLC) 15,000 partners include online and high street retailers, restaurants and cinemas. As their membership base grew to over 2.5 million, a Data and Insights team was established to analyze the vast amount of data generated from their engaged and ever growing members. With a legacy database that was not fit for analytic purposes, the team looked to gain a single version of the truth through the implementation of a cloud data warehouse, ELT tool and data visualization tool.

Industry: Retail

Employees: 150+

Website: https://bluelightcard.co.uk

The biggest impact of the Kleene project has been putting metrics and data into people’s hands quickly, easily and efficiently – now the team has access to metrics in seconds, rather than a day or two later. We can see the data we need on a daily or even hourly basis, and we haven’t had to hire a large data team. It provides us an all in one platform, rather than needing three or four different tools.

Alex Gray – Data & Insights Director

The Challenge

Blue Light Card has two key data groups, internal and external. Blue Light Cards internal data consists of members’ information, such as demographics, lifecycle and marketing. Following the implementation of Kleene, Blue Light Card tracks transactions, commissions, approvals and products. Their challenge was tracking this external data. That’s when Kleene came into play, to help Blue Light Card pull all their data and create a single source of truth.

Blue Light Card also faced a challenge when understanding purchasing actions, so they know for instance, who made a purchase, and what they purchased. Kleene has also worked with BLC on this, breaking their data down to a product level. This increases data visibility of the ecosystems and marketplace.

“When I joined BLC it took half an hour to load one report and data was difficult to access all in one go. Now I can access data in less than a minute with our transforms running in 10-15mins. This is down to Kleene taking away a lot of the manual loading and ‘plumbing’ and the power of our data warehouse and visualization tool doing the rest.” – Alex Gray, Data & Insights Director

The Solution

Creation of a data warehouse and implementation of Kleene automated ELT tool. A single version of the truth, giving people access to data quickly, easily, and providing key metrics within seconds, rather than days.

Kleene has helped Blue Light Card develop a data-driven culture. Adopting Tableau in 2021, Blue Light Card was able to deliver reports across business functions, building 77 reports across 12 themes and also managed to expand the viewership. Kleene has enabled the build of industry leading visualizations. Now, at least 50% of the team use Tableau, with champions across each department fully involved and using dashboards.

Before using Kleene, Blue Light Card was using several different platforms, such as MySQL and Power BI dashboards, making it difficult to deliver data correctly. Blue Light Card now has 18 different unique data platforms, including affiliate transactions and customer support, setting up Blue Light Card for future scalability.

“We really haven’t had to do anything, in terms of building, you don’t have to write a single line of script, that’s all been Kleene which has just been phenomenal. There’s no way we could have done it that easily without Kleene, so I really appreciate that.” – Daniel Rowley, Analytics Engineer

The Results

Blue Light Card has seen an increase in their return on investment since the adoption of Kleene. Blue Light Card was using Jupyter, notebook and Python to analyze and identify trends. However, with Kleene, they were able to create their own learning models to foresee renewal predictions.

With a single source of data truth, they have managed to reduce resources required, which has saved financial investment. Kleene has also provided a platform to create, manage and track BLC transforms and pipelines. BLC now has a complete platform for end-to-end ELT process. BLC can now access their data in one place, in real-time, providing tangible benefits including their renewal target. Following the onboarding of Kleene, BLC saw an increase in renewals from -14% to +7% of target.

The implementation of Kleene has allowed Blue Light Card to shape their business strategy, this includes closing the data gap, such as missing transactions and segment product data. BLC are now able to personalize marketing, to customize service for their clients.

“We’d be 6 months behind where we are right now if we didn’t have Kleene in place. Looking forward, we can use the foundations we have set up with kleene to develop our analytical capabilities and data science capability – build segmentations that enable us to send the right message to the right member at the right time.” – Alex Gray, Data & Insights Director