In today’s omnichannel retail sales landscape, customers expect products to be available when and where they need them—both in brick-and-mortar stores as well as online. Retailers must fulfill a variety of new models, including in-store pickup options and same-day delivery. To do so, they need granular and timely insights into all aspects of the business in order to predict demand and optimize inventory, supply chains, and fulfillment.
But with product sales information spread across different silos due to legacy technology, operations leaders are stuck using stale data. This can lead to failures in timely fulfillment and delivery, and lead to a subpar customer experience.
The Data Cloud centralizes data in one location, enabling operations leaders to access all of their SKU-level inventory and sales data in near real time. They can enrich this data with regional insights about consumer demographics and other factors that may influence demand. As a result, they can drive fulfillment innovations such as operationalizing click-and-collect and reducing delivery windows from weeks to hours. They can identify which stores have more product than they need and which stores have the potential for out-of-stocks. And they can fulfill deliveries on time, creating happy repeat customers.
Here’s how a few of our retail customers are using Snowflake to optimize fulfillment and delivery, leading to a great customer experience.
Mod Pizza
In March 2020, the pandemic changed everything for MOD Pizza. Overnight, the restaurant chain had to cut costs and radically transform from an in-person destination to a digital-first business. Company leaders had just decided to make major investments in their data stack. Snowflake and Tableau enabled them to change store layouts and processes so they could offer digital ordering, curbside pickup, and mobile delivery. Mod Pizza changed its menu to promote family packs across digital channels—a big shift from its prior strategy of maximizing individual orders. It was also able to support employees through rapid sharing of COVID-19 exposure information and self-serve access to next steps.
Intelligent Shopper Solutions
Intelligent Shopper Solutions (ISS) enables retailers to get the most from their customer data by providing an industry-leading customer and marketing insights platform. ISS needed to adapt to meet the heavy demands of the company’s expanding client portfolio. To maintain the rapid speed to insights that originally set its solution apart from competitors, ISS needed a new data platform. The company looked to Snowflake to ready its infrastructure for the future, ensure high levels of customer service, and deliver effective solutions. Having a powerful platform provides better capacity and flexibility for running more complex reports and queries and for supporting concurrent users. Snowflake also improved ISS’ back-end configuration, which has led to an up to 50% reduction in customer onboarding time. ISS now uses Snowflake for all its client data services, enabling it to easily transform, integrate, and monitor all client data.
Rakuten Rewards
Rakuten Rewards provides cash back and shopping rewards to retail consumers. The company needed a solution that could scale with its growth. After evaluating many vendors, it selected Snowflake as the foundation for the company’s enterprise data hub. With Snowflake’s separation of storage and compute, Rakuten Rewards can set up individual teams or even individual users with their own specialized warehouses for their specific workloads. The data engineering team at Rakuten Rewards isolated the workload from different business units, and even different parts of the ETL processes into different warehouses, meaning they don’t impact the performance of each other. Snowflake’s cloud-based warehouse provides both stability and visibility. Rakuten Rewards works with 3,000-plus merchants, all of whom stand to benefit from getting more insights into how the program is working for them. The company can now deliver that data in a quick and efficient way.
Discover how your organization can optimize fulfillment, delivery, and customer experience with Snowflake:
