Overview
An American office supply retailer with 1400 retail stores, $1 billion in revenue and 38,000 employees sought to bolster its digital presence and customer engagement. Their objective included expanding through online and offline channels, boosting repeat purchases, monitoring social media feedback for better customer service, enhancing marketing campaign performance, increasing sales conversation and maximizing customer spending. Their overarching goal was to widen their customer base, boost sales and foster a more engaged and loyal customer community.
The Challenge
Unveiling hurdles for a strategy with substance
It’s crucial to acknowledge the challenges in our path. From the absence of key metrics in customer data to intricacies of creating unified profiles, our client’s path to data excellence was filled with challenges like:
- Absence of metrics for customer behaviour, experiences and demographic data
- Difficulty in establishing a unified profile for sharing data across different channels
- Inability to create personalized customer journeys, messaging, product recommendations and discounts
- Time consuming process for creating data visualization dashboards
- Existence of data silos across various customer-related data types, including marketing, sales, behaviour and preferences
- Compromised data loading and Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) performance due to infrastructure scalability issues
- Complexities and human dependencies in data movement between legacy AS400 systems and other applications
The Objective
A walk through data-driven retail ambitions
App Dynamics services can be invaluable, but organizations may face several challenges when implementing and using them.
To embark on a strategic journey, our client’s objectives were built around the transformation of the data integration processes to fuel impactful retail marketing campaigns. The objectives included:
- Modernize the data integration stack by migrating to a centralized Snowflake Cloud Data Platform on Azure to facilitate launching retail Go-to-Market campaigns within specified time-limits
- Achieve customer Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and enhance customer experience through a data-driven retail marketing strategy
- Enhance marketing team’s efficiency by saving time, enabling comprehensive planning, execution, optimization and measurement of campaigns performance using precise customer insights
- Improve marketing campaign optimization to increase brand visibility and brand awareness as per customer segmentation for both new prospects and existing customers
- Ensure timely order fulfilment and quick purchasing decisions speedily through customized marketing campaigns tailored to various age-groups, avoiding data silos and adhering to set Service Level Agreements (SLAs) via real-time dashboards and timely reports using Snowflake
- Accurately and rapidly track customer behaviour data including Opt-In and Opt-Out preferences via email / phone
The Solution
A modernized data integration using Snowflake CDP
The Snowflake CDP was tailored to manage enterprise data and analytics across a hybrid platform
- HCLTech leveraged Snowflake’s inherent cloud data architecture with features like time-travel data retrieval, business continuity, governance and efficient storage of retail customer data. A customized platform was crafted to suit the specific needs of our client
Seamless interoperability between on-premises and cloud environments was achieved effortlessly
- Data integration and real-time data management with product suites like Adobe Experience Platform, Google Analytics were made possible through Snowflake CDP
- The source system data from Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM), teradata was migrated to the centralized Snowflake CDP enabling real time data management and integration
The expedited and punctual launch of customer marketing campaigns was made achievable through Snowflake
- A Snowflake secure share house schema was constructed and integrated with customer profile data using Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) product suite enabling the timely launch of diverse campaigns and journeys
- Real-time customer email engagement data was captured and stored in Snowflake CDP, facilitating effective analysis and reporting for enhanced customer experiences
The Schema architecture served as a foundation for a data visualization framework
- This enabled the generation of marketing performance dashboards and visualized data analytics crucial for launching impactful marketing strategies
- Additionally, the sales, marketing, ordering and delivery teams were able to collaborate seamlessly round the clock, every day of the year - 24x7
The effortless capturing of real-time customer experience data, monitoring the delivery processes and meeting SLAs were accomplished seamlessly
- Snowflake’s data modelling, ETL development, testing, enhancement and maintenance and production support contributed significantly to reaping benefits
The primary achievement was attracting new prospects while reducing customer churn
- The ability to instantly collect customer feedback and promptly respond to their demands led to expanding the customer base
- The creation of groups allowed for easy sharing among members, fostering continuous interaction and support for addressing any questions or concerns
The Impact
Improved scalability and enhanced data storage with Snowflake
Our client leveraged data insights from various platforms like Meta for business, Google ads and Amazon advertisements, performing comprehensive data analysis across multiple campaigns. The automated reporting system reduced manual tasks by 90%, streamlining data aggregation from diverse sources. Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse’s (CDW) central storage facilitated efficient data management for analytics, orchestration and business monitoring. The platform transformed ingested data for enhanced accessibility by internal and external users.
Seamless adoption of Snowflake's cloud services minimized production incidents, enabling quick data fixes without disruptions. This empowered data engineers and analysts, fostering agility, collaboration and data-driven decision-making.
Simple to complex data transformations were aligned with business requirements effortlessly, while unified data warehousing, advanced analytics and machine learning deployment reduced operational costs significantly.
Snowflake provided cost-effective solutions for provisioning compute resources and workload balancing, optimizing data migration. Customer insights from social media engagement facilitated continuous innovation in campaigns, improving outreach across diverse age groups and converting advertisements into sales opportunities.
- Data interpretation for efficient marketing campaigns - 40% - 50% faster campaign launching was achieved
- Data democratization enables higher productivity - 30% improvement in data loading, data integration and query performance
- Improved operational efficiencies using a data-driven approach - 20% faster report and dashboard visualization
- Supercharging workloads for customers - 20% cost saving for the client by implementing Snowflake in Azure Cloud Platform
