Bhavik Davda, chief customer insight and analytics officer, A.S. Watson, Europe
Describe your career to date
I started my career as a management accountant, where I provided financial analytical support, which set me in good stead later in my career to focus on unlocking value from data teams, but also unlocking investment from the business.
I strongly believe that by doing different roles, you are able to bring cross functional knowledge, which all adds value to my current role.
My journey has included running a loyalty programme, building a small mobile phone network and leading strategic development functions. I have also focused on implementing business side some of the initiatives that insight functions that I’ve led, for example store segmentation.
The golden thread here is that each role utilised data, analytics and insight extensively and allowed me not to only lead by example, but understand how to extract value as a customer of a data/analytics team.
What stage has your organisation reached on its data maturity journey?
Data, alongside customer, is constantly quoted by management across our various businesses as crucial. Data certainly has a "seat at the table". We continue on the journey to build data fluency from the senior management to each department at a core data analytics level, making it accessible. We also explore a number of initiatives on big data, which we centrally deliver. I believe that, as an organisation, we have a strong desire to utilise data, which is more than half the battle for many.
Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for
I have a small team of 25, who are based on the UK and act as internal consultants to predominantly the European AS Watson business units (Superdrug, Savers, The Perfume Shop are the ones based in the UK) to provide:
- Strategic guidance and governance.
- Analytics on cross business/market insight to internal and external stakeholders.
- Centralised reporting, segmentation and data science projects.
- Roadmap for tooling, and features we should be developing.
- Business sharing, connecting ideas across businesses but also bringing in external insight and thought leadership across data, analytics, insight and loyalty.
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