Pythian Blog: Technical Track

How Retailers Can Personalize the Customer Experience Using Google BigQuery

by Gowri Puvanachandran on Aug 11, 2023 12:00:00 AM

Retailers have always had to adapt quickly to changing market conditions. But the pandemic accelerated the need to transform, especially for retailers that needed to ramp up their online presence and ecommerce capabilities and gain a better understanding of their target audience—all while cutting costs to stay competitive. That’s where Google BigQuery and the right partner can help. As retailers are blending their physical and digital environments to create a seamless shopping experience, they also need to ensure that journey is personalized to each customer—in conjunction with keeping up with changing demand, ensuring their shelves are well stocked and scaling inventory as needed. In most cases, transformation has meant migrating to modern cloud-based platforms, which gives retailers the flexibility and scalability required to rapidly respond to evolving market conditions and customer demands. By moving to the cloud, retailers are also creating a foundation to leverage AI, generative AI, machine learning and smart analytics. Transforming retail includes store operations, customer acquisition, merchandising, logistics and fulfillment, omnichannel commerce and product life-cycle management, according to Google Cloud’s Digital Pulse survey. But the most advanced retailers in the survey have one key focus: analytics software.

Why BigQuery for retailers?

Whether you’re looking to gain new insights into consumer behavior, deliver a more personalized shopping experience or increase revenue by optimizing merchandise locations, the right tools can help retailers turn data into insights. BigQuery is Google’s fully managed, serverless data warehouse that allows retailers to upgrade to a flexible, scalable infrastructure. Essentially, BigQuery can ingest data from a retailer’s existing sources—third-party or internal—and put that data to work. Retailers don’t have to spend time worrying about whether they have enough capacity to handle fluctuating demands—and disappointing customers when they can’t keep up. Forecasting demand is exactly the kind of insight they can glean through granular data queries in BigQuery. BigQuery can adapt to any data type or format, plus convert formats, without additional charges. It also has robust geospatial capabilities, which can provide spatial visualizations of store locations, customer movements and stock evolution. BigQuery also offers many integrations that add even more value:
  • BI tools such as Looker can integrate with BigQuery to help make data-driven decisions.
  • Machine learning models can be built in BigQuery using Google ML.
  • Vertex AI—which now includes generative AI capabilities—allows users to build and continuously train models over time with BigQuery data.
Customers are no longer a mystery with BigQuery. By consolidating disparate data sources, retailers can amalgamate data into analytical reports that provide deeper insight. For example, users can quickly create dashboards with a 360-degree view of their customers and, using the right data, understand how they can more effectively target those customers with products or services.

Don’t go it alone—team up with the right partner

While some retailers are equipped with the resources and expertise to handle significant data migration, many are already at capacity managing their existing IT infrastructure. Working with a partner ensures your goals can be met, without straining your resources or deprioritizing your other goals. As a global technology services company that helps businesses compete by adopting disruptive technologies such as advanced analytics, big data and Cloud, Pythian has helped numerous retailers create business and data models to better support marketing tactics. We’re a premier Google Cloud partner with specializations in Data Management, Data Analytics and Machine Learning—and we’re ready to support your in-house IT team. Pythian is a true partner, ready to step in wherever you need assistance—from creating a business case and data strategy all the way to implementation. In working with us, retailers can leverage our expertise to set up a Google Cloud environment—including BigQuery—to provide deeper insights into customers’ preferences, buying behaviors and market trends. The results? A more thorough understanding of customer journeys, marketing campaign effectiveness and ROI. Get in touch with a Pythian Google Cloud expert to see how our team can help.  
Topics: Big Data Technical Track Cloud

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