Norths Collective sets 2024 as its "year of AI"

Norths Collective has set 2024 as its ‘year of AI’, after spending the past two years focused on driving ROI and improved personalisation through a digital and data transformation program of work. 

Speaking to the iTnews Podcast, chief marketing and innovation officer Robert Lopez describes in detail the 2023 portion of the program, which was codenamed ‘Project ROI’. 

The aim of ‘Project ROI’ was to create and deliver “systems, platforms and BI tools” to help Norths Collective to understand the “direct and indirect benefits that the organisation has received from this digital transformation journey.” 

Norths Collective uses a Salesforce stack for its marketing, personalisation and BI.  

First-party data sourced from a number of systems such as point-of-sale, ticketing, events, gym, and feedback collection, is passed via a Boomi middleware layer into Salesforce where it is utilised for personalisation and member engagement. 

Improved personalisation of content in emails and on websites naturally improved engagement, such as open- and click-through rates on emails. 

But Lopez said that Norths - which operates hospitality venues in Sydney and on the far north coast - also wanted to understand the success of particular special events or campaigns. 

He cites an annual visit by The Wiggles as an event that Norths Collective sought to understand the impact of. 

“Everyone loves the Wiggles,” Lopez said.  

“They visit our venue annually, and we usually do three shows in one day. It is a hell of a lot of fun.” 

On the last visit, Lopez spun up a test campaign that utilised real-time data and business intelligence to “show us what value back to the business that was delivered in the first 24 hours of a Wiggles launch campaign.” 

The venue also measured the ROI of holding the event by examining how members that were in attendance consumed food and beverages. 

Those insights enabled Norths Collective to make better business decisions about entertainment that appeals to its 61,500-strong card-carrying member base. 

“It’s great we put something on … but how are we proving this activation was an effective one for our company and something we should be looking at doing again or replicating at other venues?” Lopez said. 

Real-time operational management 

In the next few months, Norths Collective intends to start surfacing insights to its floor managers in venues to help them make data-informed decisions, in near real-time. 

Managers will be able to view takings from different locations in a venue and understand whether they have enough - or too many - staff allocated to a particular area, based on demand. 

There are also plans to surface weather data as well, which could impact staffing levels as well. 

“We do have some outdoor venues like The Greens North Sydney,” Lopez said. 

“It's very, very weather dependent. If it's a rainy day, the Greens North Sydney feels it.  

“Here, we can overlay the historical wet weather data, but we can bring some future weather predictions in as well, and that can help with rostering. 

“If there is a forecast for showers Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday next week, we can maybe use that to help us make decisions on adjusting rosters for those days.” 

Year of AI 

Lopez said he liked to “brand” every year a certain theme. 

“2022 was our year of personalisation. We were really going deeper in our martech stack on personalising in real-time,” he said. 

“Last year, 2023, was our year of ROI. 

“2024 is the year of AI.
This is the year that we really want to double down in the AI space, and we're doing that initially through some work in our call centre.
 

“We're bringing our call centre into our [Salesforce] Service Cloud world and once they've got their head around it, we're going to start bringing in the AI piece so that it can use the power of customer data to deliver back responses, email copy, or imagery that [agents] can use to respond to inquiries or [provide] over-the-phone responses even. 

“So AI is going to be a big part of our roadmap this year.”