When Moonpig launched in 2000, the greeting card company's unique selling point was letting shoppers put a custom photo on the front of their chosen card. Now, customers can add a Red Letter Days experience, pictures and stickers with the card, and AI can write a personalized greeting for them.
While most people may associate Moonpig with selling birthday cards, the firm's ambition is to be seen as a gifting company, making the card a gift in itself through features like experiences and flowers. Moonpig also doesn't view itself as a retailer, but more as a tech company, Luke Marsh, the firm's Senior Manager - Business Intelligence & Data Architecture explains:
We already started as digital, but our digital transformation is about using new tools to try and speed things up and improve things. We are trying to keep up with customer demand because their expectation of what they can do from their device is increasing day in, day out.
Marsh notes that when Moonpig launched, seven years before the first iPhone came out, society was very different to where we are now. Customers are now used to getting what they want on-demand, right now, and this expectation is only going to increase. For this reason, the company is massively investing in AI. Marsh says:
It's changing so quickly, it's almost a challenge to keep up with it and how we can make customers' lives better by using technology and keeping up to speed with that.
To help the firm in its tech efforts, and ensure customers feel they're getting value from its premium cards and gifts, Moonpig is using Salesforce technology, including Tableau and Slack.
Tableau, which has been in place for around three years, is now the source of truth for all employee interaction with data. Moonpig collates data via the Snowflake platform, but reporting-wise, everyone goes through Tableau. Marsh adds:
Even for finance to close their month end, they need to come into Tableau and get figures. It is very much the hub. Our CEO has daily subscriptions on 10, 15 or maybe more reports.
Marsh says Moonpig CEO Nickyl Raithatha will send him a Slack message asking about something that looks interesting and what it means. He says:
I've never worked in a company where someone in data is on a one-to-one relationship over Slack with the CEO of the whole company because he spotted something that has been proactively pushed to him and now he wants to understand it.
In the firm's trading meetings, data is at the forefront of every decision, so much so that sometimes a 0.1 percent change in a metric raises a question. Marsh admits:
This baffled me when I first started, but now I think it's quite cool, because 0.1 of a percent could be tens of thousands of revenue at the end of the day, depending on what metric you're looking at. The fact that these metrics are visible to people who aren't data minded, these are commercial trading or marketing people, but they recognize the impacts and suddenly go - we might need to do something here, it's the first company I've worked for that [data] has had that impact. And using Tableau made that happen.
When Tableau Pulse launched in late 2023, Moonpig signed up to the beta program to get early access to keep that data mindset going. Marsh explains:
Everyone is very data hungry, so it's trying to keep up with that provision so that they can get those answers.
The addition of Pulse has evolved Tableau from being a tool to create visualizations, charts and graphs to answer standard questions within Moonpig, to something more intelligent. Marsh notes:
If you've got questions you want to answer, you can go to Tableau and find those answers quite readily. But normally in a company, questions are easy to ask if you're either in a really positive space, in a peak; or in a really negative space, you're not hitting targets.
In those situations, questions are easy to ask: what's happening and what do we need to do to improve if things are going wrong; or what have we done that has led to over performing if things are going well, Marsh explains:
But those times where you are hitting budget, you are average, questions suddenly become less prevalent. Tableau Pulse is the new tool to help people ask questions when they don't know what to ask.
Marsh cited an example of a metric where Moonpig had the exact same data displayed in a Tableau graph and in Pulse. The line graph showed a big spike over about a week; Tableau Pulse was able to identify that the spike was a trend that changed three months earlier. He adds:
Even as an analyst, that would be very difficult to spot in a normal chart. Rather than seeing a one-week spike and going, that's a blip, let's carry on with our life; now we can say, hang on a minute, this has been a positive change that happened three months ago and it's obviously been a good change because it's stood the test of time, it's not just a one-week change. What's happened? Let's go investigate.
For Moonpig, this means that even in times where the company is hitting targets and performing as expected, it can find the right questions.
And the only way you can grow is by answering questions. So it's a question generator in a way, that's where I want to move my BI team into trying to generate more Pulse metrics to create those question dynamics.
Moonpig is keen to democratize data access, and in its London and Manchester offices, the majority of people have at least a viewer license. The firm is not a believer in locking down its data so that users in a certain team are only allowed to access that team's data.
As a publicly-traded company, there are some metrics Moonpig has to lock down to only certain users, but for 90% of its data, all teams can look at each other's information. Marsh adds:
If our product teams are generating a new feature and we're testing it with customers, someone from marketing can look at that report and see the results. It's a very open platform, it's very cross team. Everyone has a license and are encouraged to go in and look not only at the key report they use every day, but other reports to see if they can find information.
As well as being a Tableau user, Moonpig has also embraced Slack to the extent staff don't really use email anymore. If someone gets an external email, it's forwarded onto Slack to be discussed in that application. From socials to invitations, key statistics and new reports, that information is all shared via Slack. The business intelligence Slack channel has about 200 people on it, and in Moonpig's employee handbook, it covers Slack etiquette. Marsh says:
We're an emoji-focused business. We encourage people to interact with Slack messages. We don't have to worry about formal email dialogue anymore or do I need to end this with 'kind regards' or 'best regards'. You just send a message, someone will give you a thumbs up, move on.
Looking ahead, Moonpig is now focusing on taking advantage of generative AI for internal staff, in the same way it has for customers. Customers are now able to ask Moonpig to write a birthday card for a friend based on their favorite hobbies, and gen AI will write the personalized message for them. Marsh adds:
We've done it for our customers, but we're now looking internally at how we can use AI as employees. Already there are massive uses, Tableau Pulse is one of them, that's an AI feature, which I'm developing to try and use more.
Whether it's analyzing NPS feedback from customers and reviews to get themes of customer sentiment, or reducing the time needed to analyze reviews on Trustpilot from many hours to getting a summary in a few seconds, gen AI has huge potential. Marsh adds:
