A useful Scintilla Charter engagement starts with something the business needs to decide. Should we change an assortment? Investigate a loss of customers? Rework a product concept? Address a digital conversion problem? Prepare a different audience for a campaign?
Those questions lead to different work. My approach is to connect the relevant applications, examine the evidence, and help the team decide what follows. Using more of Charter should make the business more capable, rather than simply produce more reports.
Start with a decision someone owns
Write down the decision, the person responsible, and when it matters. Then ask what evidence could change the answer.
“Understand our customer” is a broad ambition. “Decide which customer need our next assortment proposal should address” gives an investigation a purpose. It also makes the missing information visible: customer behavior, the role of existing items, commercial constraints, and perhaps research that has not been conducted yet.
Agree on that purpose with the account team before opening reports. If a broker or advisor owns the client relationship, they should help shape the question and remain part of the decision process.
Look across the platform
Charter work can draw on several kinds of evidence. Walmart's Scintilla overview describes operational reporting, shopper behavior, customer research, digital analysis, and audience activation. A practical investigation might involve:
- Customer change: examine buying patterns, repeat, switching, or customer groups to understand where further investigation is warranted.
- Assortment: assess the role of products and customer needs, using the authorized assortment reports alongside operational and commercial context.
- Product, price, or promotion: examine performance and execution, then identify what additional evidence would support a recommendation or a test.
- Digital journey: investigate traffic, search, and conversion to frame a specific content, availability, or customer-experience question.
- Research and product testing: design research for an unresolved question about a concept, product, message, or experience.
- Audience planning: connect the customer question to an appropriate audience and a separate campaign-execution handoff.
These are starting questions, not an exhaustive service menu. Several may belong in one investigation. Customer Perception, for example, supports surveys, video feedback, and in-home usage tests; the right choice depends on what you need to learn. Walmart's Customer Perception guide.
Choose the route the account can actually use
Before committing to an analysis, confirm the available applications, report permissions, populations, and any research or activation costs. A Charter subscription does not establish unrestricted access to every report or category-wide dataset.
Assortment Deep Dive illustrates why that matters: ordering Performance reports and ordering new Customer Decisions or Priority reports have different permission requirements. The latter require Category Advisor status. Existing reports should be used only where the account is authorized to access them.
For partners, sponsorship and the permitted use of a client's information are part of the setup. Use Retail Reason's agency Scintilla access guide to prepare the access questions with the client. Retail Reason provides maintained operating guidance; it does not open the client's portals or supply their account data.
Make the evidence understandable
Each result needs its source, period, population, definitions, and limitations. Operational sales, shopper-panel observations, customer feedback, and modeled diagnostics answer different questions. Putting them in one presentation does not make their populations identical.
Keep observations separate from explanations. A change in buying behavior can suggest where to investigate; it does not, by itself, prove why the change happened. A promising concept test does not settle production feasibility. A sales increase after an event does not establish its incremental effect.
The useful output may be a decision brief, an action plan, or a research plan. It should identify what the evidence supports, what remains uncertain, and who can take the next step. The illustrative decision brief shows how that handoff can work.
Leave the team with something it can reuse
Some work belongs inside Charter: selecting and configuring reports, organizing supported product filters, using Boards, or teaching a team how to repeat an investigation. Report Builder supports report customization, scheduling, and sharing; the useful configuration depends on the question and permissions.
Some underlying data can also support connected analytics. That overlap is useful. A repeatable analytical process can flag a question that deserves deeper work in Charter, and a Charter investigation can improve what the team monitors afterward.
I look for a handover the team can explain: the question, the selected workflow, the evidence, the decision, and the conditions that should trigger another look. Talk with me about the Charter work your business needs.