The Limited

Uniting Multiple Channel Views of the Customer

A complex business structure with multiple brands prompted The Limited Inc., a Columbus, Ohio-based retailer, to implement a CRM system.

The Limited has an 85% share in Intimate Brands Inc., which is the leading specialty retailer of intimate apparel, beauty, and personal care products through the Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works brands. As of October 28, 2000, Victoria's Secret products are available through 872 lingerie and 455 beauty stores, through the Victoria's Secret Catalogue, and online at VictoriasSecret.com. The company offers a broad selection of personal care, home fragrance, and decor products through 1,393 Bath & Body Works and 110 White Barn Candle Company stores. Other brands owned by The Limited include: Express, Structure, Limited Stores, New York & Company, and Lane Bryant.

The CRM effort headed by Bill Lepler, vice president of CRM in Brand and Business Planning for The Limited, aimed to create a unified view of customers across multiple distribution channels. For example, in the case of Victoria's Secret, catalogue and Web information is maintained in-house; while store information is maintained by Alliance Data Systems (ADS). "The issue facing me is that we have fast-growing brands but separate channel views of the customer," Lepler says.

Bill Lepler, The Limited Inc.

The hardware and software infrastructure includes the store database at ADS, which is maintained on a Sun E10K server utilizing Informix as the RDBMS; the catalogue database kept on IBM mainframes utilizing DB2; and a data warehouse on an NCR/Teradata platform at Victoria's Secret Catalogue. E-mail management was outsourced through Post Communications in San Francisco. "The issue was how to combine store and catalogue data into one database for analytical and testing purposes," he says.

A 360-Degree View

Ultimately, The Limited decided to put the unified data into the store system managed by ADS. Some pilot projects were run to view channel cross-buying behavior, such as between the stores and Web sites. "Without the 360-degree view, we would not know if a customer bought lingerie in the store and a beauty product on the Web," Lepler says.

At the same time The Limited was working on the CRM project, ADS was modifying its data warehouse to incorporate the benefits of Ardent's DataStage (now owned by Ascential Software, which was spun out of Informix Software), and Red Brick Decision Server, owned by Informix, to modify the data structures to better accommodate flexible data summaries. These data summaries in Red Brick contain 39 months of data on over 82 million customers, Lepler says.

The Limited's first choice for a vendor was a company called Tessera, recently acquired by iXL, a consulting company based in Atlanta. "They turned down our project because they had bigger fish to fry," Lepler says.

They had heard good things about the founder of Quaero LLC, based in Charlotte N.C., so they decided to test Quaero's product and service offering. The Limited hired Quaero to manage project coordination across the internal system efforts at the Limited and the multichannel database being constructed at ADS. "They facilitated communication between ADS, the two brands, and their IT groups," Lepler says. "They helped with detailed business requirements and project management." The Limited's CRM team also sought assistance from Quaero to review vendors and make recommendations for a DSS tool for the new warehouse. Ultimately, Quaero recommended Vienna, Va.-based MicroStrategy, which has become a standard within The Limited.

"It's working out very well," Lepler says in November. "We're beginning to understand our cross-sell opportunities. We have run some pilots to prove the economic value of the database," he says.

The system should lead to easily defined benefits. For example, Victoria's Secret Catalogue mails 360 million catalogues each year. If a customer after a period of time does not respond, the company stops sending the catalogue. However, the customer could be buying in the store, and the catalogue division may not have known it. "We know we can reshape catalogue circulation to reflect a 360-degree view of the customer," Lepler says.

The system is now in a beta stage and plans are to roll it out to more IBI and Limited Inc. brands as experience is gained. "The ultimate upsides will be cross-selling, upselling, and more targeted mailings," Lepler says. "And the advantage for store analysts will be the ability to do marketing analysis based on their own queries of the database."

In advice for other IT and business managers building CRM systems, Lepler says, "There is a lot of confusion in the market, a lot of technology out there. You need very good advisors because no one can know it all; it's too big and complex. Most important, let business strategy dictate technology. There is a tendency to go with the cool software without thinking it through."

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