Large-scale data collection, processing, and analysis needn’t break the bank. Discover how Aramisauto deals with 27 million data points a day in Snowflake’s Data Cloud—continually improving its customer experience.
Part of Aramis Group, Aramisauto is the leading online seller of pre-owned and reconditioned cars in France and operates four major brands across Belgium, Spain, and the UK. With annual revenues of more than €850 million, the company has gone from strength to strength, and aims to become Europe’s preferred online and mobile used car platform—offering a range of additional marketplace tools to help people sell their cars.
But consistent growth meant Aramisauto was dealing with huge data volumes without the right tools. In fact, its data estate increased five-times in just one year—significantly inflating its infrastructure’s complexity and cost.
Aramisauto realized it needed a more flexible data architecture that could offer enhanced performance while keeping costs low. So, with an aim to use digital technology and data to ensure fair prices and customer satisfaction, Aramisauto set four key goals:
- Process increasing data volumes: Building the capacity to manage rising loads in a nuanced way by modulating performance and storage on demand
- Respond to peak loads in real time: Gaining administrative tools to increase flexibility and manage scalability in an instant
- Give staff more autonomy: Creating data marts to allow individuals to analyze and resolve issues
- Simplify data collection and ingestion: Integrating a wide range of third party tools
Accelerated data processing for an outstanding customer experience
Aramisauto selected Snowflake’s Data Cloud to deal with continually increasing data volumes, accelerate its development efforts, and best meet the needs of its customers.
The company can now collect 27 million data points each day and process them using its internally-developed algorithms—offering end customers the best possible offers. What’s more, Aramisauto’s platform can calculate a purchase price for each seller in just a few seconds.
And it’s this scale and data processing speed that Anne-Claire Baschet, Chief Product and Data Officer at Aramis Group, believes is essential to meet growing customer needs and expectations and stay competitive. Moreover, it allows the company to adjust its offer for each customer and calculate the best purchase and sale prices using relevant market data. “Our strategy is based on the value offered to the customer in terms of experience, quality, and—of course—price,” explained Baschet. “To do this, we’ve put data at the heart of our business.”
Setting a fair price for customers—in real time
Aramisauto’s ability to propose optimal prices forms part of its policy to offer the best possible customer experience. But in a fast-moving market, this also means collecting, integrating, and analyzing a wide range of data sources in real time to ensure its prices are fair.
“Around 700,000 people a year in France request a purchase price for their vehicle,” said Baschet. “Once they’ve provided all the information, we have to give them this price within a second at any hour of the day or night, seven days a week.”
Initially deployed to analyze its French and Belgian markets, Aramisauto increased its vehicle purchase conversion rate by four points in just six months using Snowflake’s Data Cloud. Similarly, four-times more customers now choose to sell their car through Aramisauto’s platform once they’ve entered their information on the company’s website.
“We’re now able to offer the best price while optimizing our response times,” said Baschet. Without Snowflake, we would’ve devoted considerably more time to implementing this strategy, unable to digest the constantly increasing data volumes. And that would’ve cost us more.”
And as Baschet explained, only paying for what the company uses with an architecture that self-scales in a modular way based on traffic is essential to its operations: “We didn’t find this flexibility or simplicity with any of Snowflake’s competitors, but these features are enormously valuable to us. We’re ready for the unpredictable, and we have a consistent goal: to fine-tune our market analysis with the uptake of increasing amounts of data, respond to our customers in real time, and control costs.”
Looking to the future: Taking it up a gear with Snowflake’s Data Cloud
Following the platform’s success in France and Belgium, Aramisauto has deployed Snowflake’s Data Cloud across its entire business—with plans to extend the platform’s use cases.
The company firmly believes that data is a significant business accelerator, enabling everyone to unearth and diagnose problems themselves. That’s why Baschet is giving Aramisauto’s staff more autonomy with data. “Snowflake enables us to easily create data marts dedicated to each team,” said Baschet. “To avoid any risk of latency or security breach, we’ll rely on Snowflake’s Data Cloud to offer all staff access to dedicated data sets with the appropriate performance for their needs. With greater independence, they’ll be able to increase efficiency in their particular area.”
Always on the lookout for additional market data to refine Aramisauto’s offering and enhance the customer experience, Baschet and her team are also experimenting with data from Snowflake Data Marketplace: “The time saving is huge because now it only takes a matter of minutes to add a new partner’s data stream, whereas before it took weeks or even months to set up the exchange using traditional methods,” explained Baschet. “Thanks to the API and pivot data format of Snowflake Data Marketplace, we’ll no longer lose time and money when converting data and implementing exchange solutions for each partner. We’re so convinced of this approach that we’ve made the Snowflake Data Marketplace our go-to place for partners.”
