Better serving tenants and visitors with data-driven customer insights

PwC introduced AI-driven insights to help one of the popular destinations in Africa understand how the neighbourhood and its tenants can drive enhanced visitation, spend and experiences.

The V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, South Africa, is one of Africa's top destinations, drawing over 24 million visitors annually. With c. 800 tenants, 100 eateries, 13 hotels, and 15 conference venues, the Waterfront aimed to leverage data to enable themselves and their tenants optimise their offerings and services to deliver exceptional customer experiences, products and services.​  

​​In-store shopping has seen a significant recovery since the pandemic but still lags 2019 levels. Per PwC’s Global Consumer Insights Pulse survey, only 43% of consumers shopped in person for products like clothes or electronics in 2023, compared to 49% in 2019. Retailers and landlords are focused on creating memorable in-store and destination experiences to compete with the convenience of online shopping.​ Meanwhile some leading destinations are bucking this trend, such as the V&A Waterfront, which aims to double down on their growth by gaining a deeper understanding of their customers and how to serve them. 

“In the global retail sector, understanding customer needs and behaviours is paramount. According to PwC's Global Consumer Insights Pulse survey, 57% of consumers now prioritise personalised experiences” said Megan Higgins, Partner leading PwC UK’s Data Intelligence Practice. “The V&A Waterfront's commitment to deeply understanding their visitors allows them to deliver these tailored experiences, driving both satisfaction and growth.” 

In August 2023, the V&A Waterfront started working with PwC to build a data-driven picture of who the neighbourhood’s visitors are and their spending patterns. They used Places Insights, PwC’s AI-powered data science platform that draws on a broad range of data sources. The most important types of data in the case of the V&A were the customer spend data​ within V&A’s merchant tenants​, ​visitor ​footfall ​data ​and global travel data showing where​ from, how and when​ visitors to Cape Town were coming​. ​  

There were a range of factors the Waterfront wanted to understand in greater depth – for example, where visitors come from and how different nationalities spend time in the neighbourhood. International visitors are an important driver of spend at the Waterfront, with different countries making up the largest group of visitors at any one time. December is the peak month for tourists, at the height of South Africa’s summer, but the country has more visitors from the Middle East, for example, over July and August. Meanwhile, domestic spend remains hugely important, and the Waterfront needed to understand the different personas of domestic customers and their drivers of spend, including category and brand affinities and spend frequency. The Waterfront’s customer mix changes every day, week and month and especially during and around large international business conferences and sporting events.  

Having a clear picture of travel patterns and spend by different customer ​groups provides the Waterfront’s tenants with the evidence to make customer-centric decisions to improve visitation and spend, rather than making a best guess or working on long-held assumptions about what different types of visitors want. This picture will also help the Waterfront and its tenants invest in unrivalled visitor experiences to surprise and delight all that come and visit. 

The V&A Waterfront’s owners also chose to work with PwC because the data-gathering and analysis are carried out as a managed service. Places Insights uses machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence (AI), to unify data and generate ​insights which are then distributed to the Waterfront’s different stakeholder groups, spanning the board, its ​investors and tenants.   

The V&A Waterfront wanted to give the highest levels of reassurance to tenants that their data would be handled securely in providing their transaction data into the programme.   
  
​The first step in setting up the managed service was to carry out a pilot, which took place over the autumn of 2023. PwC used Places Insights to analyse two years of V&A Waterfront data, including weather and parking, as well as the key sources of anonymised card transactions, global travel data and footfall numbers.  This data now serves as a baseline for comparison as PwC’s managed service, which began in April 2024, provides regular insights to the landlord and tenants. 

“Traditional insights services using aggregated market-level data typically are not representative of total interactions, can lack geospatial relevance and provide limited actionability for stakeholders,“ said Will Leighton, Director in PwC’s Data Intelligence Practice, PwC UK.  “The insights we have delivered are actionable because they are timely and tailored to the specific ecosystem overseen by the landlord and in which its merchants operate”. 

​The anonymised data, securely stored and compliant with GDPR and POPIA, helps derive insight without compromising individual privacy.​​ 

The insights generated have provided an increased understanding of their visitors, both domestic and international, to support strategic decisions within the Waterfront’s marketing, operations and leasing teams. In addition, the insights shared with tenants have allowed them to understand the underlying drivers of customer visitation and spend, and high value as well as opportunity customer segments. 

Andrew Smith, ​​Commercial Partnerships and Strategic Projects Manager​​ at the V&A Waterfront, commented, “The data-driven insights provided by PwC have been instrumental in boosting our understanding of our customers in order to enhance the overall visitor offering and experience.”