From Strategy to Execution on Snowflake and Looker

About Customer

The eCommerce vendor is a pioneer in the beauty subscription service delivering 4 to 5 full- size products valued at over $100 for just $21 a month to its consumers. They provide brands with an all inclusive 360 digital marketing campaign across multiple platforms, including access to a pool of high profile influencers, putting products directly into the hands of prestige beauty consumers at no cost.

About Intricity

Intricity is a team of specialized Data Management, Data Warehousing, and Business Intelligence experts. The team members at Intricity have been handpicked over the course of 20 years, and represent the top talent globally in data-oriented disciplines.

Challenge and Wins

Challenge

Due to the eCommerce vendor’s market execution they were growing between 10-20% per month and onboarding new enterprise scale systems would help them keep pace. Data acquisition between these systems acted as strategic processes for tracking customer activities. However, they acted independent of each other. Thus, accurately visualizing and understanding customer activities required the eCommerce vendor to conform the data across these various applications manually. This created tons of bottlenecks for understanding what was actually happening in their organization. To compound the problem the eCommerce vendor was acquiring Magento as their e-commerce platform which was going to expand the complexity of their solution.

Win 1: Engaging with the C-Suite to Develop a Strategy

Intricity partnered with the CEO and his direct reports at the eCommerce vendor to develop a Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence strategy which allowed the data to be componentized for a wide variety of analytical use cases. These use cases traversed the subject matters of Sales/Finance, eCom, Customer Support, Marketing, Product, and Inventory.

This partnership with the C-Suite went far beyond the initial strategy phases but delved into many other exploratory opportunities to leverage data as a strategic asset across the C-suite.

Win 2: Development of a Solid Data Model and Metadata Layer

The data model Intricity and the eCommerce vendor designed produced a level of analytical flexibility and reuse that they had never experienced previously. The organization could traverse the customer experience in a variety of subject matters and domains despite data being sourced from different systems. This model coupled up with Looker’s metadata layer provided a widely adoptable solution which could be shared by technical experts and everyday consumers of information.

Win 3: Integrated Data Share of Kustomer

The eCommerce vendor uses Kustomer to manage their customer service experience. Since the eCommerce vendor was a Snowflake customer they were able to adopt Kustomer’s data share and integrate it into their analytics. Intricity developed a series of Looker views to interrogate the Kustomer Data Share and expose it to their user base.

Win 4: Integration Leveraging Snowflake as the Transformation Engine

Intricity leveraged Alooma and Python to develop the data stream and it’s transformations. This really paid off when AWS had their big outage in 2017, as Alooma successfully buffered all the updates and loaded them as AWS came back online.

Intricity developed the Python scripts to have all the transformations occur in Snowflake, leveraging Snowflake’s horsepower to transform their complex data feeds.

As the Google acquisition of Alooma came to fruition, their feature set and support began to wane, Intricity began an Alooma migration to FiveTran which provided more maturity and better support. This migration enabled the eCommerce vendor to stay current with the latest replication features.

Win 5: Compelling Custom Visualizations

Intricity partnered closely with the the eCommerce vendor’s management to develop data visualizations which provided deep and meaningful value for their teams that were consuming data. One such visualization was developed jointly with the CEO which allowed a view of customer events across all the process swim lanes. This provided full perspective of the customer lifecycle within the organization. This is one of many custom visualizations which the eCommerce vendor uses today in their Looker environment.