NOVEMBER 2024retailtechinsights.com 19UNLOCKING CUSTOMER INSIGHTS: SHAPING THE FUTURE OF RETAIL WITH DATA SCIENCEBy Sascha Netuschil, Head of Data Science, bonprixA Journey of Transformation and InnovationAfter completing my degrees in automotive engineering and cultural anthropology, I began my career as a mechanical engineer and later transitioned to a role as a social media analyst. During this time, I discovered my passion for data analytics, both in terms of technology and methodology. This passion led me to join bonprix as a data scientist 11 years ago, at a time when the term "data scientist" was not widely recognized. I quickly realized that we were not fully utilizing the wealth of data we were collecting. While we engaged in reporting, data analysis, and A/B testing, much of our data remained untapped.I viewed web tracking data as one of the most direct ways to understand customer behavior, preferences, and pain points. At that time, we were also building the technological infrastructure to process our data more efficiently, which allowed me to propose our first two in-house data science projects: dynamic marketing attribution and real-time session churn prediction. While these projects were not the easiest to tackle, and we faced significant challenges, they provided invaluable learning experiences that helped us refine our methods and processes.Over the following years, we took on more projects, leading to the formation of a dedicated data science team and eventually a full department. Simultaneously, we continued to enhance our technological infrastructure and adopted a product organization model to develop data science products in an agile manner. Today, I lead a department of 10 data scientists, collaborating with various teams to manage four data science product teams. Together, we develop AI-driven products for our sales department, covering a wide range of applications, including recommendation and personalization services, marketing models (such as attribution and marketing mix modeling), customer cxo InsIghtsSascha Netuschil
< Page 9 | Page 11 >