New Way Now: Pepkor consolidates 64M customer profiles with Salesforce and Google Cloud

Featured in this video: Michael Yolland, Head of AI, Pepkor NexTech

Executive summary: Pepkor, a South African retail conglomerate with over 6,500 locations across 23 brands, needed to consolidate its massive, fragmented customer data to launch a unified loyalty program. By partnering with Salesforce and Google Cloud, Pepkor integrated Salesforce Data 360 with BigQuery to create a single view of the customer without having to move complex transactional data. This architecture allowed Pepkor to successfully condense 64 million disparate customer profiles down to 24 million, eliminating redundant marketing spend and fueling a new cross-brand loyalty program that has already driven a 5% increase in revenue from engaged customers.

Challenge: As a large conglomerate that grew through acquisitions, Pepkor faced significant data silos across its 23 brands. A single shopper interacting with multiple Pepkor brands — or even buying different products within the same brand — was often recorded as three or four disparate people. The resulting fragmentation yielded 64 million disconnected customer profiles that hindered marketing efficiency as the team repeatedly sent redundant messages to the same individuals. Pepkor wanted to launch a group-wide loyalty program to understand cross-brand shopping behavior, but lacked the clean data foundation necessary to make it a reality.

Solution: Pepkor engaged Salesforce to harmonize 72 complex data feeds into a unified architecture, completing the process in just 18 months. Because Pepkor’s rich transactional data and advanced machine learning models already resided in Google Cloud, the team leveraged BigQuery alongside Salesforce Data 360. This integration provided a seamless solution: Rather than moving massive amounts of data, Salesforce served as an activation layer that could fetch customer attributes directly from BigQuery on demand.

Result: The unification effort successfully condensed 64 million fragmented profiles down to 24 million accurate, unified customer identities. With a true 360-degree view of their shoppers, Pepkor successfully launched its "+more" loyalty program, revealing valuable insights about cross-brand shopping behaviors that were previously invisible. Since the launch, Pepkor has seen a 5% increase in revenue among engaged loyalty program members. The company is now positioned to drive long-term customer lifetime value across the entire group, offering targeted, highly personalized retail experiences based on a customer's specific life stage.



Highlights and key takeaways from our interview with Michael Yolland, Head of AI at Pepkor NexTech:

→ “The main reason that we sought Salesforce out was to help us with 64 million customer profiles that we believed we had. We eventually ended up at 24 million profiles.”

→ “We've seen about a 5% increase in revenue from the people that are engaged in the program. And we can definitely attribute this to both Salesforce and Google Cloud”

→ “With Google Cloud and Salesforce, Pepkor is building a new way to bring value to our customers.”

Google Cloud products used: BigQuery

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