How Retailers Get the Most Out of Data with Data Warehouse BigQuery

Gartner estimates poor customer experiences derail 30% of digital business projects. Can your business beat those odds? How does a data-driven retailer become a customer-centric business?

Customer-centric organizations have an unswerving commitment to understanding their customers’ needs and desires and delivering the products and services that meet those expectations in the current context. Customer-centric businesses listen to their customers, anticipate their needs, and adapt to deliver accordingly.

Data is the key to delivering on those ideals. However, the sheer scale of data insights and the infrastructure needed to support it is becoming an increasing burden for many organizations. So how does a customer-centric retailer easily harness data insights without committing to a large upfront spend?

Cloud-Based Data Warehouse BigQuery

Google BigQuery is a serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective data warehouse designed for business agility. It provides the tools to ingest, store, analyze, and visualize data through business intelligence tools. All on Google-managed infrastructure.

Ingest Data

Bringing structured and unstructured data together is simple with BigQuery. You can bring data in from multiple sources for seamless analysis. BigQuery accepts data files such as Avro, JSON, ORC, CSV, and Parquet from local sources, Google Drive, or Cloud Storage buckets. BigQuery Data Transfer Service automates data movement into BigQuery on a scheduled, managed basis. Data Fusion plugins and data integration partnerships are other available options. You have complete flexibility in how you bring data into the data warehouse.

Store

In-house data storage management is a headache for retailers. Fully managed storage in BigQuery reduces the time spent on computer upkeep, and you only pay for what you use, providing complete flexibility to scale up (or down) as needed. With the fully managed approach, Google takes care of the infrastructure so you can focus on data analysis, even up to petabyte scale. Reduce the time spent on hardware and software upkeep and pay only for what you use, with flexible storage options to cater to your needs.

Analyze

For data analysis, BigQuery ML enables you to create and execute machine learning models in BigQuery by using standard ANSI:2011 compliant SQL queries through the Cloud Console UI and BigQuery command line. But what if data stores are elsewhere? Multicloud silos data and make complete analysis difficult. BigQuery Omni overcomes those difficulties and lets you run BigQuery analytics on data stores in AWS S3 or Azure blob storage. Omni enables you to avoid the cost and data duplication issues caused by copying or moving data to a central location, and lets you bring the BigQuery analytics engine to where your data resides.

Visualize

As the backbone of business intelligence solutions, BigQuery integrations allow several business intelligence tools to run complex data and turn it into compelling stories. Also, for Google Workspace users, Connected Sheets enables regular employees to access data through Google Sheets, letting them leverage massive amounts of data using the tools they are most comfortable with, like pivot tables, charts, and formulas.

Google Case Study: E-commerce company Zulily

Increasing revenue and enhancing customer experiences with real-time analytics

Zulily is an American ecommerce company with more than 5.3 million daily customers visiting their site and 9,000 new product styles being launched every day. Optimizing revenue and inventory on such a massive scale requires real-time intelligence, and that means analyzing constantly growing streams of clickstream data. 

Zulily realized they need a flexible, cost-effective and scalable data warehouse to  track site visitors’ behavior to enable more satisfying customer experiences and drive more profitable interactions. So they turned to Google Cloud Data analysis solution. Using real-time analytics on Google Cloud enabled Zulily to drive a significant increase in sales conversion in just a few weeks and be able to scale clickstream data collection 100-fold. 

Accelerate digital transformation with Google Cloud and CloudMile  

Don’t get caught behind in the wake of digital transformation. Agile retailers can see the benefits of migrating to the cloud to analyze their data for actionable customer insights. Start reaping the benefits of going full-cloud with a trusted Google Cloud partner like CloudMile today. 

CloudMile, Google Cloud Managed Service Provider (MSP) has been empowering businesses to accelerate digital transformation through cloud technology and machine learning. Partnering with CloudMile, you can make the best use of cloud resources and shorten the time to business success!