Largest Beauty Retailer in the US Powers Digital Transformation with Google Cloud Smart Analytics
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Digital technology offers increasing flexibility and choice to consumers. As a result, the retail industry is dramatically shifting toward more tailored and personalized experiences for shoppers, and businesses are rethinking how they deliver value to customers.
This couldn’t be more true for the beauty retailing industry where leading companies are turning to digital technology to create customized shopping experiences.
At Google Cloud, we’re particularly excited about our work with Ulta Beauty, the largest beauty retailer in the United States with more than 1196 stores in all 50 states, and how the company is using Google Cloud technology solutions to power personalization and redefine beauty retailing.
Established in 1990, Ulta Beauty has had incredible success as a company, and as customers become more discerning and curious about their purchases, the company is finding new ways to meet their changing needs.
Recently, leaders at Ulta Beauty recognized a huge opportunity to complement and enhance the shopping experience by helping beauty enthusiasts navigate through more than 500 brands and 25,000 products carried in their stores and online channel.
They decided to leverage the data from Ulta Beauty’s successful Ultamate Rewards loyalty program to create and offer more unique and personalized user experiences.
With more than 30 million members generating data through sales, transactions, product reviews, and social media engagement, Ulta Beauty’s Loyalty Program creates a comprehensive data set, and the company sought the right technology partner to help organize, analyze and transform that data into valuable insights for its customers.
Ulta Beauty’s leaders knew they had an opportunity to leverage data analytics and machine learning to reach customers in new ways, enhance the guest experience, and continue to grow their active loyalty member base. After considering a number of cloud providers, they chose to expand their existing partnership with Google Cloud.
“Google Cloud listened to our needs and worked in tandem with our engineering team to address our challenges,” said Michelle Pacynski, vice president of digital innovation at Ulta Beauty. “The ease of working with the Google Cloud team and their breadth of experience made the decision a no-brainer, laying the foundation for a great partnership.”
In 2019, Ulta Beauty announced it was working with Google Cloud Platform to unify and organize its data, using:
- BigQuery to perform data analysis and generate dynamic content, personalized product recommendations, and event-based messages for customers.
- Cloud Storage to provide highly available, secure, resilient and cost-effective access to data across the entire enterprise.
- Compute Engine for the high-performance scalability needed to grow with customer demand while painlessly migrating existing applications to the cloud.
- Anthos to build a hybrid cloud foundation that allows their applications to take advantage of all this data, combining the power and flexibility of GKE with the ability to leverage their existing investment in secure infrastructure on-premises.
Our partnership with Ulta Beauty has enabled increased engagement with customers in store and online, and the creation of new tools and capabilities, including a new Virtual Beauty Advisor tool to deliver tailored recommendations and help shoppers choose the right products, and a Customer Conversation Platform that’s enabling deeper connections with guests, ultimately driving customer loyalty.
“It’s been a really efficient process so far due in part to the ease of working with the Google team,” said Michelle Pacynski, vice president of digital innovation at Ulta Beauty. “They’re experienced, approachable, and their can-do style makes for a great partnership. They listened to our needs and worked in tandem with our engineering team, figuring things out, and getting it done.”
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CCAI Insights: Answer Customers’ Queries & Understand Them Better with Conversation Data
With CCAI Insights, businesses can drive contact center efficiency, solve customer problems and leverage data from customer interactions to understand them better!
CCAI Insights, a core piece of the Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI product suite is built to help contact center management dive into data to adjust business needs, preempt problems with timely analysis of customer conversations and keep agents prepared. Additionally, businesses can automatically feed data into Insights from other areas of CCAI like Dialogflow CX or another product sources. Watch the video to find out more benefits and capabilities of CCAI Insights in elevating CX.
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How to Build and Maintain Spark and Hadoop Clusters Quickly, Easily and Inexpensively
How often have you struggled to create Spark and Hadoop clusters only to have them become unstable?
Building and maintaining clusters that are the building blocks of big data analytics should not be a time-consuming, repetitive, and expensive process. But with the current set of tools, it often is.
Google Cloud Dataproc solves this. It is a fast, easy-to-use, fully-managed cloud service for running Spark and Hadoop clusters in a simple, more cost-efficient way.
Operations that used to take hours or days take now seconds or minutes instead, and you pay only for the resources you use (with per-second billing).
Watch this five-minute demo to find out how—with just a few clicks—you can set up clusters that build and heal themselves. You’ll find out how to creating a large Dataproc cluster with preemptible VMs, which help run large clusters at a low total cost.
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Video: How AI is Helping Biologists Protect Wildlife
According to the World Wildlife Fund, vertebrate populations have shrunk an average of 60 percent since the 1970s. And a recent UN global assessment found that we’re at risk of losing one million species to extinction, many of which may become extinct within the next decade.
To better protect wildlife, seven organizations, led by Conservation International, and Google have mapped more than 4.5 million animals in the wild using photos taken from motion-activated cameras known as camera traps. The photos are all part of Wildlife Insights, an AI-enabled, Google Cloud-based platform that streamlines conservation monitoring by speeding up camera trap photo analysis.
With photos and aggregated data available for the world to see, people can change the way protected areas are managed, empower local communities in conservation, and bring the best data closer to conservationists and decision-makers.
Camera traps help researchers assess the health of wildlife species, especially those that are reclusive and rare. Worldwide, biologists and land managers place motion-triggered cameras in forests and wilderness areas to monitor species, snapping millions of photos a year.
But what do you do when you have millions of wildlife selfies to sort through? On top of that, how do you quickly process photos where animals are difficult to find, like when an animal is in the dark or hiding behind a bush? And how do you quickly sort through up to 80 percent of photos that have no wildlife at all because the camera trap was triggered by the elements, like grass blowing in the wind?
Watch this video to find out.
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Lead Your Company Towards Data-Powered Innovation
In this talk, Lak Lakshmanan, Head of Analytics and AI Solutions, Google Cloud, presents a prescriptive, proven approach to foster the ability of your organization to innovate with data.
This approach has helped other Google Cloud customers handle key challenges around data size, speed, and a (lack of) structure.
This five-step journey provides immediate short-term benefits at every stage and sets your organization up for transformational growth.
The first step is to simplify operations and lower the total cost of ownership and build a common data platform by migrating legacy data warehouses and data lakes to the cloud.
Next is to break down silos, democratize data access, and build a data culture.
The third step is to make decisions in context (taking location and near-term behavior into account) and do so faster with real-time dashboards and real-time AI.
The fourth step is to build the ability to absorb AI and leapfrog with end-to-end packaged AI solutions.
Finally, with the ability to integrate AI already in place, it is time to empower data-driven innovation with scaled AI platforms.
Making Mothers’ Day Special: How Google Cloud Migration for 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc Impacts CX
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Editor’s note: In honor of Mother’s Day, we look at how 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. migrated to Google Cloud as part of its digital transformation to quickly deploy seamless and convenient customer experiences across multiple brands on Mother’s Day and every day.
As a leading provider of gifts designed to help customers express, connect, and celebrate, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. has embraced cloud technologies to grow and transform its business through constant innovation. As part of our digital transformation, we recently completed the migration of our ecommerce platform and other services to Google Cloud. We’ve transitioned from a monolithic to a microservices platform, moved many workloads from our on-premises data centers to our Google Cloud environment, and scaled both horizontally and vertically.
Since our migration, we’ve developed efficient processes to launch new brands, improved the customer experience across all brands, and seen significantly increased site traffic.
Nurturing a more delightful customer journey
Customer delight is at the core of everything we do. Whether it be with a flower bouquet, a sweet treat, or a personalized keepsake, our mission is to deliver smiles. With the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve all been challenged to find unique and safe ways to continue honoring the special connections in our lives and celebrating occasions with loved ones. Our customers have adapted by doing things such as sending gifts to isolated loved ones, sharing the same meal together virtually, or using video to engage with others through group activities like flower arranging and building charcuterie boards.
The customer experience is a top priority for us, and we constantly look for innovative ways to enhance the customer journey across our ecommerce platform of more than a dozen brands. As a result, we’ve continued to see a rise in demand as customers enjoy the ease and convenience of our site and discover our full family of brands.
Migrating to a cloud-first mindset
As we’ve continued to innovate and iterate on the customer experience, we knew we wanted to evolve our platform. We wanted to shift to a microservices platform, which would allow our team the opportunity to release updates to our site more often and set up the right continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices.
Working with Google Cloud, we were able to move our ecommerce platform to the cloud and standardize our site and brand deployment by building one release that could then be repeated across all of our brands. We built everything in a modular fashion, including microservices and code libraries, so that sites could be easily constructed and replicated for each brand. And because of this, we were able to launch Shari’s Berries extremely quickly after we acquired the brand in 2019.
Moving our platform to a completely homegrown solution of microservices was a daunting task. But our team handled it beautifully through load-testing, stress-testing, and building new monitoring tools. And with Google Cloud supporting us all along the way, managing the migration process was simple and easy from start to finish.
Arranging a better bouquet of services
Currently, we’ve migrated every customer-facing touchpoint for all of our brands to Google Cloud—whether it’s on the web or mobile, our AI bots, or our chat interfaces.
- We run on Google Kubernetes Engine and Istio.
- We have nearly 200 microservices built to help power our entire ecommerce stack across several cloud services running on Google Cloud.
- We’re utilizing BigQuery for our offline intelligence.
Results are coming up roses
Our new stack on Google Cloud has benefits for both us and our customers. We moved from a session-based to a token-based system, which provides enhanced security as well as a consistent, convenient experience across all our brands. Using service workers and a single-page app, we are able to download all the relevant site content to the browser in under two seconds to create an instant-click experience for each and every customer. We also use Google Analytics to measure our user interactions and provide personalized results to each customer. Our hope is that with this new system, we can learn from customer behavior to offer gift givers a more personalized shopping experience during each visit.
The benefits of our new tech stack have not only helped us enhance the solutions we offer to customers today, they’ve also enabled us to offer new ones at lightning speed. With our legacy system, we used to release new code once a week or once a month. Now, even during our peak periods, we’re able to release 10 to 15 times a day and can deploy and pivot quickly to create new microservices and microsites on the fly—often without having to touch any code.
Efficiencies abound
The benefits of moving our platform to Google Cloud have extended to our internal teams as well. Before the migration, we had only two environments for developing and testing, which made it time-consuming to test updates before they went into production. Now with Google Cloud, we have several different journey teams—which are made up of developers, product owners, and technical owners—all working in several different environments, solving problems, and creating new solutions together.
Everyone is now empowered to be self-sufficient, developing and releasing microservices on their own when they’re ready. This has given our developers more time to take part in continued development and learning opportunities. For example, we offer lunch-and-learn sessions as well as other resources for everyone to take advantage of so they can continue to learn and refine their skills.
Planting the seeds for future growth
As we look to the future and think about how we help our customers express, connect, and celebrate, we’ll continue to collaborate across teams to deliver solutions that spread smiles. Specifically, we’re exploring additional use of AI to help us better serve our customers across all our brands.
We’ve enjoyed the ongoing support we’ve received from the Google Cloud team as they help us build new solutions and design a road map for the future. Their support has helped the 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. team to realize the power of the cloud and bring the very best experience to our customers.
Learn more about 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc., or check out our recent blog about cloud migration for the real world.
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