Powering AI-Driven insights: How Custobar's data fueled Columbia Road's AI Agents for Scandinavian Outdoor

We at Custobar are passionate about seeing companies harness the full potential of their customer data. A fantastic example of this is the recent project between Scandinavian Outdoor, a leading Nordic outdoor gear retailer, and the digital sales consultancy, Columbia Road. They collaborated to leverage AI, aiming to swiftly uncover valuable insights from customer data. With Columbia Road's innovative AI agents drawing data from Custobar (our Customer Data Platform), Scandinavian Outdoor gained a clearer understanding of customer behaviour, store performance, and growth opportunities, leading to more focused and effective marketing.

The starting point: unlocking insights from untapped customer data

Scandinavian Outdoor was keen to maximize the potential of its customer data to enhance personalised customer experiences and gain deeper strategic insights. However, like many B2C e-commerce businesses, their team faced limitations in time and in-house resources to consistently surface and act on the wealth of insights buried within their marketing automation and customer data platforms.

Columbia Road's approach: making complex data insights simple and actionable, powered by Custobar data

This is where Columbia Road's expertise came into play, supported by Custobar's robust data infrastructure and capabilities. Columbia Road integrated two pre-trained AI agents with Scandinavian Outdoor's live customer data, accessed via Custobar, their marketing automation and CDP. Custobar served as the central data hub, providing a reliable and structured feed through its API for Columbia Road's AI agents, which focused on Purchase Behaviour and Customer Profiling. This setup enabled the AI agents to transform natural language questions into actionable analyses, dashboards, and strategic recommendations.

We understand that effective solutions are often born from strong collaborations. The synergy between Scandinavian Outdoor’s commitment to data-driven strategies, Columbia Road’s AI proficiency, and Custobar’s dependable data platform was key to this project's success. This allowed the Scandinavian Outdoor growth team and management to:

• Model customer lifetime value across different segments.
• Compare shopping behaviours and CLV components between top-performing and lower-tier customer deciles.
• Derive omnichannel insights linking offline and online behaviour to long-term customer value.
• Connect behavioural patterns to the product catalogue for enhanced merchandising and targeting.

Unified, multichannel data that is always as relevant, valid and easility usable as possible is one of Custobar’s product development’s cornerstones. Custobar is proud to provide the foundational data layer that enables partners like Columbia Road to build and deploy advanced AI solutions. Our platform is designed to support an evolving ecosystem where customer data can be seamlessly and securely utilized by innovative third-party tools to drive marketing actions and business growth.

Thanks to the AI Agent, we could dive deep into our customer data in Custobar quickly and easily. Before, this would’ve taken us hours, but now we've got to the insights with just a few prompts. For example, it was really interesting and useful for us to compare our different stores and see how our best customer segments (top deciles) perform in each one. This data helped us identify concrete areas for improvement, which we can now use to make our store-specific marketing more effective. The whole process was quick and easy. Columbia Road gave us some great ideas and findings, plus clear guidance that made it easy for us to use the agent ourselves.

 

 

 

 

Kuutti Haapanen, Head of eCommerce and Marketing, Scandinavian Outdoor

Impact: turning insights into smarter decisions and better outcomes

By leveraging Columbia Road's AI agents, which drew on comprehensive data from Custobar, Scandinavian Outdoor was able to extract deep insights at scale—a task that would have otherwise required significant manual effort. These insights empowered their growth team to steer strategic decisions, prioritise high-value segments, and better align their offerings with actual customer behaviour.

Crucially, the agent's data model was built around Custobar's flexible data structure. This meant that Scandinavian Outdoor could interact directly with their data via the AI agent, asking questions, pulling key segments, and even preparing updated datasets ready for reintegration into Custobar. This closed-loop capability, facilitated by Custobar, lays the foundation for future automation and real-time updates. It’s Scandinavian Outdoor’s proactive, data-driven mentality, combined with Columbia Road's expertise, that made this pioneering step possible, and we anticipate much more innovation to follow.

Project highlights: key moments in bringing AI insights to life

• Rapid onboarding: From a live demo at a Digital Commerce Finland event in February to a live integration in April, showcasing efficient collaboration.
• Natural language interface: Columbia Road's AI agent democratised access to complex analytics for both management and growth teams within Scandinavian Outdoor.
• Strategic alignment: The solution enabled data-driven decision-making without requiring deep technical resources from the client.
• Future-ready architecture: The system was built with the potential to trigger automated actions directly from the AI agent back to the Custobar CDP and marketing automation, showcasing a forward-thinking approach.

Custobar is delighted to be the data platform that supports such groundbreaking projects. This initiative underscores the power of combining a client's data-driven vision, the specialized expertise of a partner like Columbia Road, and a reliable Customer Data Platform. We look forward to seeing and supporting more such collaborations that push the boundaries of what's possible with customer data.

If you want to hear more about the possibilities that AI agents could bring to you on top of Custobar - you can be directly in touch with Columbia Road’s General Manager Ville Loppinen or Stefan Melander from Custobar.