reecetech Inspires a Data Revolution, Re-engaging 12.4% of Inactive Users

Customers are at the heart of Reece Australia’s business. At Reece, we’re customer-obsessed and are always looking for fresh ways to develop new customer relationships and improve our overall customer experience. That’s because we know the only way to succeed in the plumbing and HVAC industries is to be laser-focused on what customers—in our case, trade professionals—really want.

With the rise of new technologies and the younger generations of tradies, our industry is continuously evolving. Within the next decade, Millennials and Gen Z will make up the majority of the workforce. Such a dramatic change in our customer base presents a new challenge to stay ahead of the curve and support them with different technologies.

I’ve been at reecetech since 2022, first as a principal product analyst and currently as a project management lead. In both positions, I’ve found that customer data is the best way to stay on top of customer preferences and evolve our offerings. However, the biggest obstacle to success has been getting the right data to help teams understand whether they're delivering value to our customers.

Identifying our blockages

As our team developed new products to help our tradies better manage their time, we realised we had an opportunity to upgrade our own tech. We needed smooth and easy access to our customer data, but our existing tech stack had hit three major blockages:

1. Our legacy reporting system required a central data team and long lead times. It took too long for our BI analysts to develop reports and come back with answers to product queries. As a result, our metrics always lagged behind the real-time user experience.
2. We were unable to dive deep into particular features and problem areas. We couldn’t connect outcomes to root causes of behavior, so even when we noticed engagement shifting one way or the other, we couldn’t decipher whether it was due to a feature launch or an organic factor. We couldn't determine where to focus our attention.
3. Our teams lacked confidence because of siloed data analysis. Only one or two people in the business were familiar with our data stack, creating inefficiencies.

None of these problems were structural—this was a software issue. We needed to better quantify product value, close our feedback loop, and make better decisions for our customers. And to do that, we needed to optimise our Amplitude instance.

Priming the digital analytics pump

reecetech had implemented Amplitude Analytics before my time, but we had plenty of room to expand its use. I was familiar with its comprehensive product analytics suite, and having spent a decade dealing with the shortcomings of other BI tools, I knew it could transform our operations.

Jamie Lim, our solutions architect, and Nicola Morrissey and Sharron Xia, our amazing account managers, were and continue to be instrumental in growing and developing our product. The team provided support when establishing our initial data taxonomy, which meant we could get started quicker, see value much sooner, and onboard teams more efficiently.

In addition, we were fortunate to participate in a North Star workshop led by John Cutler. That workshop was tremendous in accelerating our product team's strategic thinking, developing our own North Star, and connecting our data needs to our overall business strategy.

The positive results started flowing almost immediately.

Generating a revenue uplift in just six weeks

One key initiative I led focused on analysing growth levers for reecetech’s digital tools to see if the data could reveal fresh ways to increase new user acquisition and boost overall revenue.

The team did some research with Amplitude and discovered that new customer acquisition was actually reecetech’s least valuable source of growth. Instead, reactivated dormant customers were a much stronger cohort of Weekly Active Users (WAU) once we re-engaged them. If we could find a way to reactivate more of these users, we’d have a more sustainable and more valuable growth pool.

I partnered with our product marketing manager to launch a new Amplitude-based targeted activation campaign over a three month period. It was simple, but it worked: We reactivated 12.4% of dormant users (+1.1% YoY), leading to a revenue uplift over the six-week campaign.

This was one of the first targeted activation campaigns at reecetech, and its definitive success is an example of the power of data and the impact of data-driven decisions. Since then, we’ve increased our data-driven segmentation and run several more dormant user reactivation campaigns through Amplitude—all resulting in continued success. We’ve seen an 8.4% increase (+1.2% vs. SPLY) in usage of our digital products, and our high-value account usage has grown by 60%.

Boosting confidence in decisions that matter

Amplitude is one of the most important elements of our success at reecetech.

Today, every new feature has data to support its development, and teams can quickly respond to changes in customer sentiment. Our head of product checks customer feedback every morning, and our product managers leverage Amplitude for high-level engagement metrics and feature performance. Customer support teams feel the difference, too: They feel more confident using data to understand customer problems and can measure the impact of bugs in real-time, supporting PMs with prioritisation.

Amplitude has given us the tools to understand customer pain points, monitor how many people use our products, which products they use, and what we need to create. We’re able to focus on the most significant problems first, and from there, we can dive deeper, launch experiments, and decide whether to switch off less valuable features.

These days, reecetech is a truly outcome-led team. We’re not just waiting to see if the engagements go up or down or bogging down our BI teams with time-intensive tasks. Amplitude has been an invaluable partner for our company—and it has empowered us to be invaluable partners to our tradies.