SMG: Driving customer loyalty with a data warehouse optimized for advanced analytics

Service Management Group (SMG) offers an easy-to-use experience management (XM) platform that helps brands get smarter about their customers. The XM platform, smg360, helps customers drive changes that boost customer loyalty and improve business outcomes. SMG partners with nearly 500 brands across the restaurant, retail, and healthcare industries.

Challenge

SMG’s business runs on delivering data-driven reports and insightful dashboards that are unmatched by the competition. Organizations can customize reports, dissect data and create role-based reports in real-time.

As SMG advanced its platform, the scale, variety, and type of data and workloads exposed its data infrastructure limitations. SMG has seen exponential growth in the volume of data it analyzes and expects that growth to continue for the foreseeable future. 

In a world where consumers frequently jump from one device to the next, it became essential for smg360 to be a truly omnichannel platform. 

Solution

The cost of scaling SMG’s legacy data warehouse was prohibitive and as such, the business wanted to leverage public cloud services to support future growth and product development. Therefore, it needed a cloud-agnostic platform that could easily and cost-effectively collect and process 10X more data and grow beyond it, if required. 

Furthermore, SMG knew the future of its business services lay in insights uncovered via advanced data science and AI algorithms, requiring a platform that could seamlessly enable the use of those tools.

Taking all of this into account, SMG migrated from its legacy vendor to the Cloudera Data Warehouse (CDW). With the flexibility to scale on demand and pay on consumption, SMG was able to keep expenditures low and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) by 2.5X.

“Running in the cloud gives us the flexibility to scale up as needed. So during the normal course of business it is a smaller environment with fewer nodes. Then, if and when we need to, we can scale the environment dynamically,” said SMG Data Architect Kyle Travis. 

This included a close partnership with Oalva, SMG’s Hadoop technology service provider and a proud partner and reseller of Cloudera solutions. Working together, they were able to complete this transition with minimal customer impact. 

Another key ingredient of the successful transition was Cloudera’s unique Premier Support offering. With predictive and proactive support, the team was able to surface and solve potential issues before they occurred.

Results

In its legacy environment, SMG data scientists had to extract data before they could run machine learning (ML) algorithms. With Cloudera Data Warehouse, the data is available in an easily consumable form, SMG can unlock its value with data science, and new use cases are regularly being identified and developed. 

One use case currently in flight is customer churn prevention. SMG can now evaluate behavioral data, transaction data, and survey data, to predict how likely a customer is to churn. With a sharper understanding of the customer journey, SMG can quantify the impact of losing a customer and provide recommended actions for retention and to improve loyalty. These predictive insights provide valuable benefits to SMG’s customers and allow them to take action before they lose customers and revenue. 

This enhanced smg360 reporting platform, which supports 175,000 users with 400,000 web and mobile sessions daily, enables SMG’s customers to see all of their brand metrics on a single dashboard. The platform provides real-time ad-hoc analytics on customer experience feedback and equip customers with democratized analytics and actionable insights. 

“Our new environment allows us to provide some multi-source analytics that we weren't able to provide before, so that is a tangible customer experience realization,” said Atkinson.

With fast, multi-source analytics, smg360 is helping brands better understand and serve customers through new applications and visualizations. One new feature is tracking history for case management and guest recovery. 

Looking to the future, SMG is building out its platform to continue to capitalize on the latest technological advancements.