With nearly two decades of industry experience, Eoin is an experienced digital leader with a demonstrated history of working in the retail and supply chain industries and a strong background in digital marketing, e-commerce, market research, and customer experience. Notably, he recently held the position of Head of CX – Digital Transformation and Insight at delivery company Hermes, before making the switch to join Parkdean Resorts in early 2020.

“I like to think that I’m quite a data-driven, rational person, when it comes to making decisions, ” he says. “I like to take the data, reflect on it for a while, make the call and move on – press ahead.”

“The most important thing to me is that the data that’s informing your decision is clear and you can understand the trends that sit behind it. People often take the data, look at it, run it again, look at it a different way, and they’re still not 100% sure – but at a certain point you have to take the leap, and I’d rather be that person.”

Eoin’s desire to make the jump and not to overthink too much has served him well throughout his career so far, and is something he applies to his personal life, too. With a new house, a wedding to plan, and a baby on the way, it’s all systems go at the Kenneally household at the moment. 

“I do tend to make decisions based on what things are going to bring to your life, and what you want to achieve. So, for me it’s the right time for all of this – yes, it’ll be hectic for a little while, but once it’s all done you’re going to be exactly where you want to be.”

As for Eoin’s professional life, he discusses his process for making any sort of major commercial decision. Firstly, it’s about understanding the opportunity and rationale for making a certain call, understanding the value proposition, and – crucially – acknowledging that you’re actually going to be in a position to action something. Over the years, Eoin has seen many great ideas for innovation begin to stack up as the physical resource or time needed simply isn’t there. Plus, even the most logical decision maker needs a hand now and again, and for Eoin, that process for sense checking decisions and having an “internal sounding board” to rely on is imperative.

“I think, for any decision, you have to follow the concept model in terms of what the data’s showing you. What’s the potential benefit and – to quote my boss – is the juice worth the squeeze? If you’re going to put a lot of effort into something, you need to know what you’re getting out of it. Getting people to believe that and buy in to what you’re planning is the hardest thing – you could have the best idea in the world but if no one else is on the journey with you, you’re on your own!”

As is often the case, Eoin finds that a focus on the commercial benefits that a decision will lead to is a sure-fire way to get colleagues excited and bought in. As such, he always ensures he’s focusing on the upside rather than any potential downside associated with making a certain call.

“You can always mitigate risk one way or the other,” he says. “Yes, that new product you’re launching may not stick, but at the same time, it might stick. Plus, the cost of launching that product versus the potential benefits for the business will most often outweigh any given risk. I always focus on the commercials.

“There’s a good example of this from my time at Hermes. There was always a belief within the business that those who were shipping hundreds of thousands of products a week were the most valuable, most important customers. However, those who were maybe running a little side hustle, shipping two or three things, weren’t worth focusing on.

“But, using data, we could disprove the internal concept of who we should be going after and where the benefit was for the business. Those shipping just a few items were far more cautious, and far more willing to take on additional products or services like insurance or recorded shipping, or overestimate how much things weigh. So, from a margin perspective, the data showed us that a high volume customer was worth 10p per item, but a low volume could be worth £2-3 per item.”

This leads the conversation nicely to Eoin’s time at Hermes, where he worked for seven years and spearheaded major digital transformation projects including the launch of the online ‘Myhermes’ offering. It was at Hermes that Eoin made, in his words, one of the best commercial decisions of his career.

“When I joined Hermes there was a backlog of ‘stuff’ – that’s the best way I can describe it! – that the business had planned. And I came in and had the unenviable job of being the bad guy and saying no. The decision was really hard but I stripped out 200 of these requirements – stuff like bespoke elements for the website and experiential marketing – and put them in the bin. I focused on helping the customer ship their products quickly and get them out the door, whilst also providing them with good content and SEO…to help us beat the Royal Mail!”

The results of this decision helped to transform Hermes’ e-commerce offering. When the site went live, there was a 100% bump in SEO visibility, while conversion rates rose to 11% for new customers and 45% for those returning.

“There was a lot of outcome bias in my head; if we do this it’ll be better, we don’t need to do this fluffy stuff, because people want to come in, do the job and leave. Of course, time has been a good judge of this decision and we were since able to evolve and those nice-to-haves – video systems, QR codes, personalized messaging – that were originally-binned ideas four of five years ago are now available. But first we had to focus on the commercials and deliver a product that does the job – that then allows you to add more of that kind of stuff.”

New beginnings

Eoin closed the door on his time at Hermes at the start of 2020, embarking on a new journey with Parkdean Resorts, the UK’s largest holiday park provider. It’s safe to say that this was an interesting time to transition into the wonderful world of travel and tourism, with the COVID-19 pandemic drastically altering the business’ operations.

“I had a few offers on the table, but having met my boss I felt that the company itself and the potential it offered was really compelling. Working in travel was going to give me a chance to explore a different way of working. But, of course, eight weeks after joining I was stuck in my box room and our new shiny office in Leeds was empty – and we’ve since been delivering our entire transformation project from our houses.”

Eoin’s current focus at Parkdean is on launching a brand new website in September, building a user-focused platform focused on what customers want and need. It hasn’t been an easy journey during the pandemic – in fact, he only first stepped foot on a Parkdean resort, one of 67 across the UK, one month ago! 

“It’s been interesting, sure. In terms of having to ‘unlearn’ old ways of working, I came from Hermes with really deep legacy knowledge, and that isn’t the case here. While the business is well established, the board is relatively new, and everything is changing at the same time – IT, data, e-commerce, operations. We’re not yet in a position to work in that agile way, data is still raw in a certain respect, and the business is on that journey to change. The whole business is being levelled up, which is really exciting to be a part of. The last two years have been a big change, obviously, and accelerated our need for innovation, so we’re more or less starting with a blank canvas.”

As we delve deeper into the impact of the pandemic, the conversation turns to the future of decision making. What lessons have been learnt since the start of 2020, and how will these shape commercial decisions going forward? 

“A lot has been learnt in recent months, definitely. I think a lot of people have been more productive working from home, and are maybe working longer as well, so they’ve actually had the opportunity to do the work to get the decision making out the door. In the past, people may have struggled to find the headroom to find a concept, get the backing, and then deliver something.”

“Going forward, businesses will still expect that level of quality. In terms of looking to the future of decision making, what will happen is probably more user-friendly tooling; ways of engaging with data on your own – without needing data science or engineering in the background – to get an answer or recommendation quickly. And, because you know the data is solid, you can make those fast decisions. Basically, it’s the democratization of data, and that’s where people have been going for a long time.”

While this perhaps conjures up images of some sort of Alexa-style, ask-a-question-get-an-answer utopia, for Eoin, the really exciting part about introducing technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) into decision making is its ability to spot micro-trends that people aren’t able to pick out on their own, and use them to the business’ advantage.

“At Parkdean, we have 4,000 pages within analytics. You can only look at so much, at a certain percentage of data. You can understand the customer journey, trends, and what’s happening generally, but those small micro interactions on pages – what people are doing, what’s going well, what’s going wrong – AI can tell you a lot more to help you maximize traffic, remove underperforming pages, do a lot of testing, and so on. 

“That’s really going to help someone in my position, because AI can help me with things like A/B testing. Put it into the decision engine alongside what we think the outcomes are going to be, run the test and let the AI pick up the inbetweens (this test might be winning but it’s also failing in other areas and so on). The output should never be win versus loss; it should be ‘this won outright, but if you bring in other elements from the other test, it will be a better overall result’ – so you can go again and keep going, all the time!”

At Peak, we’ve long since championed the ability of AI, particularly applications of it like Decision Intelligence, to act as a great focuser. The proliferation of data means that businesses are dealing with enormous amounts of noise in their decision making, and with only so many hours in a day, technology needs to be able to help people in roles like Eoin’s surface trends and bring them to their attention.

“At Parkdean, there’s huge potential there given the volume of data we’re dealing with, particularly when you factor into account things like park-wide Wi-Fi and mobile apps. You can effectively build up a 360 degree view of someone’s holiday – the pattern of people moving around, when certain areas are busy or quiet, where people are buying food from and so on.

“Once you have that sort of picture of your data, you can think about what that does to your staffing, your food preparations, your revenue management, your capacity within any given venue – the possibilities are endless. That sort of AI-enabled complex segmentation of customers is a gap that everyone’s missing at the moment; being able to know for sure what’s working and what’s not.”

As restrictions continue to ease, footfall returns and Parkdean’s holiday parks start to resemble some form of normality again, the next few months will undoubtedly play a pivotal role in the transformational journey that Eoin has embarked on with his colleagues. After almost two years of remote working and park closures, there’ll soon be more customer data for Eoin to play with, putting him in an even stronger position to make the right decisions, at the right time, to keep Parkdean holidaymakers happy. 

From where we’re standing, Eoin, you’ve earned a break or two yourself!

Your merchandising team is aware that you have excess inventory of a type of sneaker spread across different warehouses across the country.

After a lot of digging into vast spreadsheets of SKU information, you see that the sneakers aren’t selling. You’re not sure why.

It’s now reaching the point where you’re considering dropping the price in your online store.

You hope that the marketing team will place them on the homepage, and in the discount section, and in the next mailshot, but this might take a couple of weeks as they are super busy – and still you won’t be guaranteed to shift the rest of the stock.

Given the sales of similar shoes in the past, you think that you’ll need to drop the price considerably before the end of the season. You’ll lose margin, but you’ll hopefully shift the rest of them to release the capital employed.

The sneakers are spread out across the country and in different warehouses, too, so it will also take a while to fulfill the orders. Customers might be frustrated, but they’ll eventually have bagged themselves a bargain, and be happy.

At least you hope so.

Scenario #2: The same company, and yet different

Your merchandisers can see that across your thousands of products, those same shoes were not selling as quickly as expected. They spot this rapidly, just days after the sneakers were launched. They didn’t have to search – this anomaly was flagged automatically.

At the click of a button, the marketing team can see a segment of customers that are in the market to buy and who love this brand. 

In a few clicks, they’ve set up and sent a personalized marketing message to them, and within a day, the rate of sale has increased massively.

For the remaining pairs that didn’t sell, the same team instantly set up a PPC campaign to target likely buyers at a low cost-per-acquisition (CPA). The rest now sell. What’s more, you’ve personalized the experience and upsold them with a set of socks that other customers think are the perfect pairing. The margin on those is higher. 

The goods are already on the way – your warehouses already had the optimum stock levels in each location, based on predicted demand, with your pickface optimized to fulfill promptly and efficiently. 

This information is fed back into the systems used, so it learns over time. It gets better, easier, faster, more accurate.

This organization is responsive, lean, connected, and operating in sync. 

No margins lost, no inefficiency, and lots of growth. 

Imagine what it would feel like to work at the second company – to be a member of a team that could operate at such a consistently high level. To make impactful decisions quickly and consistently.

What’s the difference? The second company is a Decision Intelligence-driven company.

A new category of technology

So, what is Decision Intelligence? Decision Intelligence is a new category of technology. It’s the commercial application of artificial intelligence (AI) to drive revenues and profits, but all that really means is that for the people within that organization, their decision making has been transformed.

AI comes in many different guises, but in essence it is software that learns to make predictions and categorizations over data. Even the most impressive bits of AI that exist today, such as Siri, or self-driving cars, are bundles of predictions and categorizations over vast, complex data.

The potential applications of AI are vast, but Decision Intelligence is concerned with using AI in a commercial context, specifically looking at commercial outcomes. It’s not enough for projects to exist in isolation, away from the front lines; Decision Intelligence ultimately exists to help commercial decision makers make great decisions quickly, and empower organizations to leapfrog their competition, to dominate their industry, and to win.

Three simple steps

The way to become Decision Intelligence-driven is deceptively simple. Here it is in just three steps:

1. Combine as many disparate, relevant sources of data and information together as possible
2. Enrich that data using AI so you can quickly make different predictions and categorizations over all of it
3. Put those predictions and categorizations to use wherever they can drive decisions, to increase growth, revenue, and profit

This simplicity belies the fact that to do the above is not an easy endeavor. It requires that you be able to move from raw, sometimes unstructured, separate silos of information all the way through some complex data science, to being able to rapidly put that enriched data to use in various different places in a business. Peak has been partnering with customers to help them become Decision Intelligence-driven for years. But we’ll come to that a bit later…

Teams of people, turned up to 11

Decision Intelligence is immensely powerful because it represents the first time that the technology we use can go beyond computing and showing us data (though it can do that, too.) With Decision Intelligence, it can help to guide, inform, and suggest courses of action to us, and predict the consequences of those decisions. In other words, technology can now make commercial decisions with us.

It also represents the ability for all commercial decision makers to operate at a level that is simply not possible without this technology. For example, when making a decision, using any and all relevant information will make the decision more informed and, therefore, better.  For a person, this can become prohibitively time consuming – thousands of lines of information in a spreadsheet, with loads of columns, hundreds of reports, and disparate pieces of information. Dozens of separate business systems, millions of data points, and an incalculable number of different scenarios. With Decision Intelligence, all of that data can be combined, analyzed and predictions made, instantly. It gives time back to people to work on the outcome of the decision, allowing everyone to do more with each day. 

With Decision Intelligence you can spend time on results, not on the sourcing, combining, and analysing of data. 

Decision Intelligence can help make cross-functional, organization-wide decisions in a way that has never been possible before. By always connecting up disparate, previously siloed data sources across multiple areas of a business, decisions can be made in the knowledge of how different events, market conditions, and decisions affect each other.

• Predict demand more responsively by looking at marketing campaigns and external data rather than just at what has already sold
• Shape demand by pushing targeted and effective marketing campaigns for the products that you want to sell
• Sell unsold products at maximum margins by running campaigns to interested customers at the click of a button
• Optimize supply chains based on demand that you can now shape, not just predict

All areas of a value chain of products can be operated in sync – all in a constantly improving, responsive, ever-improving system. An entire organization can operate in harmony, working together towards a common goal – growth, profit, and winning. 

It also means that an organization can react faster to external forces faster than ever before. If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that market conditions, customer behavior, and how we consume can change rapidly and unpredictably. Decision Intelligence, as described, is uniquely equipped to allow people to react quickly. Since models can be retrained and take into account vast data sets and look at patterns as they shift, Decision Intelligence can help us adapt, and adapt fast.

Decision Intelligence capitalizes on changes in consumer behavior and market conditions, grabbing opportunities from the jaws of indecision.

In other words, it’s superhuman decision making, all the time

Importantly, Decision Intelligence helps amplify the potential of the individuals within companies, not to replace them. Great companies are made of great teams of people, pouring their experience and knowledge into driving it forwards. Decision Intelligence does not seek to replace people, but to empower them to be consistently great at what they do.

In the first examples, we used a retailer to illustrate the power of Decision Intelligence, but it’s not limited to a particular industry. Any company that wants to transform its decision making and drive revenue and growth can benefit from this new way of thinking about organizational-wide decisions. Peak predominantly works with customers across retail, manufacturing, and consumer packaged goods (CPG), but we also understand that Decision Intelligence can be used in any industry, by any company looking to drive growth. 

Decision Intelligence is bigger than Peak, and that excites us.

It’s not the future, it’s now

This is not a pipedream. Companies are already reaping the benefits of utilizing AI to drive business outcomes.

75% of what you watch on Netflix is suggested to you by AI. 35% of Amazon’s sales are driven by its recommendation algorithm.

McKinsey predicts that those that move quickly to adopt AI are going to win, and that  “front-runners are likely to benefit disproportionately. By 2030, they could potentially double their cash flow.”

Peak believes that using AI to drive commercial decisions should be accessible and not reserved only for tech giants. We’ve helped the likes of PrettyLittleThing, Speedy, Aludium, AO, Footasylum, PepsiCo and more embrace the transformative change that Decision Intelligence can bring. We’d love you to read more about their success.

Decision Intelligence is a new term for the work we were already doing. We’re really excited to be able to share what it means to us, our customers, and the future of commercial decision making. 

You can probably tell.