SunLife · Financial services · Data strategy and martech
Building the data foundations for a single customer view
SunLife had a wealth of customer data but no true understanding of customer behaviour across the funnel. We ran a Digital Experience Assessment across six martech platforms, producing a gap analysis, an architecture blueprint and a prioritised roadmap toward a single customer view.
What happened?
How it went.
The problem
SunLife is a UK financial services company for the over-50s, with over 24,000 Trustpilot reviews and a Defaqto five-star rating, operating at scale across digital and offline channels. As a business generating a large volume of customer data, it recognised that data volume is not the same as data intelligence. It held performance metrics, sentiment data and campaign results, but lacked the connective tissue between them: a clear picture of why customers behaved as they did across the full journey. The goal was to move beyond what customers did and how they felt, to understand what influenced them, surfacing patterns like which calculator users are more likely to convert, or which behaviours may indicate a vulnerable customer, so SunLife could build truly personalised, real-time experiences.
What we built
We were engaged for a Digital Experience Assessment: a structured consultancy engagement to build a comprehensive picture of SunLife's technology, data infrastructure and customer journeys, and to produce a prioritised roadmap to close the gaps. It began with workshops involving marketing and technical stakeholders, each focused on a specific platform or workstream, building a rigorous current-state picture before architecture and recommendations. We assessed ways of working, ran deep-dive reviews across six core platforms, analysed the digital journey across the site and between channels, designed the ideal connected architecture for a single customer view, and synthesised everything into a prioritised, costed roadmap.
What came after
The assessment gave SunLife something they had not had before: a joined-up picture of their data landscape, a diagnosed set of gaps, and a prioritised plan to close them. The three deliverables, a gap analysis, an architecture blueprint and an actionable roadmap, laid the foundation for faster decisions, greater personalisation agility, and the ability to measure the incremental impact of optimisation.
“The goal was not more data. It was a clearer understanding of what the data was saying about customer behaviour across the full funnel.”
SunLife engagement
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