What’s New in Retail: Bits from Google Cloud’s Retail & Consumer Goods Summit
7970
Of your peers have already read this article.
3:00 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Today we’re hosting our Retail & Consumer Goods Summit, a digital event dedicated to helping leading retailers and brands digitally transform their business. For me, this is a personally exciting moment, as I see tremendous opportunities for those companies that choose to focus on their customers and leverage technology to elevate experiences.
Our event includes breakout sessions to help retailers and brands become customer centric, embrace the digital moment and transform their operations. Some of my favorite sessions include:
- Why Search Abandonment is the metric that matters, highlighting Retail Search, and featuring a conversation with Macy’s
- Driving Consumer Closeness in a Privacy-Centric World, discussing how retailers and brands can create a successful first party data strategy, featuring a conversation with P&G
- The Modern Store: 7 Innovation Hotspots, sharing how retailers and brands can approach store transformation to unlock the most value from technology, featuring a conversation with The Home Depot.
I’ll be speaking in our Retail Spotlight session, discussing the current retail landscape and our industry approach, followed by conversations with Albert Bertilsson, Head of Engineering – Edge at IKEA Retail (Indga Group) and Neelima Sharma, Senior Vice President, Technology Ecommerce, Marketing and Merchandising at Lowe’s.
Let me share a bit more about the topics we’ll discuss in that session.
In retail specifically, digital-first shopping journeys are blurring the lines between the physical and digital brand experience. Shoppers want to know what’s available before they visit your stores, and they expect fulfillment options like curbside pickup. We see this when tracking trends for interest in curbside pickup or in-stock items.
This has left many retailers asking how they can get smarter with their data, tackle the $300 billion dollar problem of “search abandonment,” move faster to create new customer experiences, and do a better job of connecting their employees and customers – with confidence.
Our team has been spending time thinking about how we can rise and succeed in this new era together. We continue to focus on areas where we can bring the best of our capabilities to our retail customers around the world. And we’re focused on ways we can bring the best of what Google has to offer through cloud integrations.
Our goal is to help retailers become customer-centric and data-driven, capture digital and omni-channel revenue growth, create the modern store and drive operational improvement.
Let’s dig into each of these strategic pillars in a bit more detail.
Become customer centric and data driven
Customers today expect experiences that are timely, targeted, and tailored for them and their needs, and reject experiences that can’t deliver these features. Data modeling, legacy technology, and siloed systems often prevent retailers from providing that level of personalized experience.
At Google Cloud, we work with global retailers and our ecosystem partners to activate and bring value from first-party data, particularly in the field of customer data platforms (CDPs). This includes integrations from Google Cloud, such as our business intelligence platform Looker and other popular platforms to power one source of customer data through the organization. We also help retailers modernize their data warehouse with Looker for gathering business intelligence across their organization. This is important not just for consumer data, but inventory, supply chain, and store operations as well.
Capture Digital and Omnichannel Growth
We power some of the largest e-commerce sites in the world, helping them scale for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other holiday events. While scale is critically important, it’s also important to consider the quality of the online experience. How do your customers find products? How can you help deliver seamless online and omnichannel experiences?
To help, we’re building product discovery solutions that bring together the best of our technologies that help retailers drive engagement with their consumers. Retail Search, for example, gives retailers the ability to provide Google-quality search on their own digital properties – search that is customizable for their unique business needs and built upon Google’s advanced understanding of user intent & context.
The imperative is clear. Recent research found that retailers lose more than $300 billion to search abandonment — when purchase intent is not converted into a sale due to bad search results — every year in the US alone.
Today, we announced that Retail Search is available to a larger set of retailers. If you are interested in learning more about Retail Search you can contact your sales representative for additional details.
Create the modern store
With the rise of buying trends like curbside pickup and proximity-based search, our Google Maps Platform team is working on new products and features to help raise inventory awareness for your shoppers. We want to help you make it easier for them to understand what’s available to purchase in their channel of choice.
With Product Locator, each product page connects customers with information they need for local pickup and delivery options. This ensures customers are aware of pickup and delivery options throughout the buying journey—not just checkout.
Awareness of local inventory can boost a wide range of key metrics for your business. Shopify recently shared that shoppers who opt for local pickup over delivery had a +13% higher conversion rate and that 45% of local pickup customers make an additional purchase upon arrival.
This is just one quick example of how our Google Maps Platform team can improve experiences for your shoppers.
Operational improvement
It can be challenging to operate in a world and at a time when consumer behavior and supply chains are so disrupted and volatile, and where entire retail teams had to go remote during the pandemic and beyond.
We’re working with retailers to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to improve consumer experience through chat bots or conversational commerce that solves problems for customers from anywhere. You can learn more about these offerings in our Conversational Commerce with Google breakout session, featuring Albertsons.
As the need for digital transformation continues to accelerate, Google Cloud is helping retailers stay ahead of the curve with solutions for digital and omnichannel growth, data-driven and customer-focused experiences, and operational improvement. For every era of cloud technologies, from the past into the future, Google Cloud is committed to providing solutions to retailers.
Read more about our solutions for retail, and check out additional sessions, including the CPG Industry Spotlight Session How To Grow Brands in Times of Rapid Change – Featuring L’Oréal at our Retail & Consumer Goods Summit.
City of San Jose Ensures Critical Services Reach Community Using AI Translation
5175
Of your peers have already read this article.
1:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
San José is one of the most diverse U.S. cities, with residents speaking more than 100 languages. Several years ago, we set out to improve city community interactions through more equitable service management and delivery. This demanded a new approach to automating the intake of requests from a majority population whose first language is not English.
We first created the 311 portal and app, which was an important step as we effectively separated resident service requests from emergencies. The way we describe it to our citizens, you call 311 for a burning question, and 911 for a burning building. In the last fiscal year, San José 311 received nearly 210,000 contacts by phone and an additional 211,000 service requests through the SJ 311 app.
Through the portal and app, we gave citizens an omnichannel experience enabling them to interact with the city to request improvements, access useful information, and get emergency help when they need it.
In order to truly serve our diverse communities, we recognized language translation services would be required to offer truly equitable services to everyone. That’s when we started working closely with SpringML, Google Cloud, and other partners with involvement from our Mayor and City CIO.
Building public services with community engagement in mind
When we first rolled out the My San José website and mobile app, we used an out-of-the-box translation service that ended up not working. It had poor accuracy and did not meet our needs to provide all citizens with coherent services. After looking at many other options, we decided to partner with SpringML and Google Cloud to leverage the AutoML Translation with other technologies such as our virtual agent.
SpringML was selected through an open RFP process, and helped us to build and optimize our integrations, interfaces, and more between several systems, making the app and website more intuitive to manage. SpringML delivered the product we needed on time and up to specifications, and additional value came from the training sessions they provided to our team. This enabled us to understand everything we could do with AutoML and opened the door to other enhancements such as simplifying the vernacular used with our residents, making government access easier to navigate regardless of natural language spoken.
After establishing the My San José app’s translation capabilities using AutoML, SpringML also helped us incorporate Dialogflow virtual agents. Dialogflow also positions us to make modifications with our own staffing practices – something that has become increasingly important amid the frequent changes in service levels from COVID-19 response in the past year.
Responding to community needs
With the app up-and-running, our next step was to bring in community members to help with testing, improvements, and more. We wanted the app and the website to not just be something we provided to the community, but rather something they helped us build so they would readily adopt it.
Thanks to the greater accuracy of translation supported by Google Cloud services, we were able to leverage the expertise of a small pool of community members to evaluate translations. AutoML Translation and Glossary proved to be a powerful combination that pushed us closer to our goals.
Our primary targets were Spanish and Vietnamese translations. We are now seeing 90 percent accuracy in automated Spanish translations while Vietnamese translations continue to improve. We continue to work to simplify the language used in these services, which makes a big difference in terms of ensuring optimal language accessibility.
This work includes best serving our community members who primarily use phones to get in touch with us through 311 services. Using Google Cloud Contact Center AI, we have been able to effectively manage the calls we receive 24×7 and communicate with residents who speak Spanish as well as English. No matter which channel one of our residents choose to use to reach out, we can serve them efficiently.
A well-timed release
We’re proud of the work we’ve done. We’ve made many government services available to our community 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — accessible through many channels. Regardless of a person’s native language, the consistency of experiences enjoyed by everyone is improving every day thanks to AI. We’re also actively incorporating more language translation capabilities to better serve more people.
While we began this process several years ago, the recent integration of machine learning language translation with our customer relationship management system in late 2020 was very well-timed because we were able to incorporate this into our COVID-19 pandemic response.
We’re also beginning to work with other municipalities across the U.S. to share some of the lessons we’ve learned and success we’ve seen in hopes of furthering more equitable citizen services far beyond our City limits.
We are excited to continue working with SpringML, Google Cloud, and other partners to improve our city and the equity and quality of services that our residents enjoy.
Learn more about how you can work with a Google Cloud Partner here.
5502
Of your peers have already downloaded this article
1:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
IDC recently examined the benefits of implementing BigQuery for SAP data. The findings reveal massive improvements to the SAP customers’ overall business results due to faster access to data insights, lower data warehouse operation cost, and increased productivity among the data warehouse and development teams. Download the report now!
Google Cloud Introduces Enterprise-grade Scheduler across All GCP Regions
3418
Of your peers have already read this article.
1:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Reliably executing tasks on a schedule is critical for everything from data engineering, to infrastructure management, and application maintenance. Today, we are thrilled to announce that Google Cloud Scheduler, our enterprise-grade scheduling service, is now available in more GCP regions and multiple regions can now be used from a single project removing the prior limit of a single region per project.
With many enterprise customers deploying complex distributed cloud systems, Cloud Scheduler has helped solve the problem of single-server cron scheduling being a single point of failure. With this update you are now able to create Scheduler jobs across distinct cloud regions that can help satisfy cross-regional availability and fail-over scenarios.
Furthermore, you are no longer required to create an AppEngine application in order to use Cloud Scheduler. For existing Cloud Scheduler jobs, it is safe to disable the AppEngine application within the project. Jobs will continue to function without an AppEngine application.
Creating jobs in different regions is easy. You simply pick the location where you would like your job to run. For example you can specify a location when creating a job through the gcloud command line :
HTTP Targets
gcloud scheduler jobs create http <job-name>--location <cloud-region>--schedule <cron-schedule>--uri <target-uri>
Pub/Sub Topics
gcloud scheduler jobs create pubsub <job-name>--location <cloud-region>--schedule <cron-schedule>--topic <topic-name>(--message-body <message-body> | --message-body-from-file <file-path>)
AppEngine Services
gcloud scheduler jobs create app-engine <job-name>--location <cloud-region>--schedule <cron-schedule>
Or you can pick a location when creating a job through the Cloud Console:
Google Cloud Scheduler is now available in 23 GCP Regions, and this number is expected to grow in the future. You can always find an up-to-date list of available regions by running:
gcloud scheduler locations list
We hope you are as excited about this launch as we are. Please reach out to us with any suggestions or questions in our public issue tracker.
Forrester Report on Indian Healthcare: Why this Sector’s Seeing Greater Cloud Investments than BFSI or Retail
DOWNLOAD WHITEPAPER4186
Of your peers have already downloaded this article
11:45 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
The healthcare industry in India is experiencing a rapid change, becoming one of India’s largest sectors in terms of both revenue and employment. But healthcare firms are under immense pressure to improve clinical outcomes and reduce the cost of care. Healthcare firms must recognize that their patients are customers who demand an experience that mirrors the depth that technology has reached in the rest of their lives. Healthcare delivery is becoming an increasingly digital experience for doctors and patients alike. To thrive in this new reality, healthcare executives need to deliver mature, clinically meaningful digital experiences to their patients.
However, many healthcare executives are concerned about aging devices, legacy software, and an expanding ecosystem of connected devices. To succeed, healthcare firms must explore the potential of digital technologies and increasingly focus on how to deliver on customer outcomes through digital customer experience, digital operational excellence, digital innovation, and digital ecosystems.
One way they are doing that is by adopting a public cloud strategy.
But these approach isn’t without it’s challenges..
To find out more about what’s behind these trends, download Forrester’s report now.
VMware Engine’s Exciting New Updates: A Google Cloud Journey
1344
Of your peers have already read this article.
2:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
IT leaders today are being asked to simultaneously support their company’s infrastructure, find opportunities for growth, and meet their goals with fewer resources and smaller budgets than before. Recently we highlighted three customers who are leveraging Google Cloud VMware Engine to achieve these goals while lowering their TCO and transforming their organization.
It’s because of these successful customer outcomes that we have been awarded the 2023 VMware Cloud Innovation and SaaS Transformation partner achievement award for delivering solutions that accelerate customers’ digital transformation journey. We’re honored to receive this award and continue to stay focused on delivering tremendous value to our customers.
In the past few months, we’ve also made several updates to Google Cloud VMware Engine. Today’s post provides a recap of the latest milestones that make it easier for you to migrate and run your vSphere workloads in a cloud-first, enterprise-class VMware environment in Google Cloud.
Back in September 2022, we announced a number of updates including the preview of API/CLI support (which is now available). In February 2023, we also talked about how to use NetApp CVS as datastores for VMware Engine.
Key updates this time around include:
Availability of VMware Engine in Delhi, Santiago and Milan regions: This brings the availability of VMware Engine to 17 regions worldwide, each supporting 4 9’s of uptime SLA for clusters 5 or more, serving the needs of our regional and multi-national customers. In addition, we have also added a second zone in the London region.
Filestore datastore support for VMware Engine: Generally Available in all VMware Engine regions, you can use Filestore High Scale and Enterprise tier instances as external NFS datastores for VMware Engine nodes. Filestore is VMware certified as an NFS datastore with VMware Engine. You can size compute and storage capacity independently to meet your workload requirements for your storage-intensive VMs. You can also leverage vSAN for low-latency VM requirements and scale Filestore from TBs to PBs for the capacity hungry VMs. If interested in this feature, please contact your Google account team.
Stretched private clouds: These private clouds stretch across two data zones and a witness zone all within the same Google Cloud region. Stretched private clouds use vSphere and vSAN stretched clusters to provide compute and storage high availability against zone-level failures. This capability is now available in Frankfurt and Sydney regions. Learn more here.
Zerto solution version 9.5u1 support: This recovery solution allows critical infrastructure and application virtual machines (VMs) to be replicated continuously from your on-premises vCenter to your private cloud. Learn more about setting up Zerto here.
Google Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery (GCBDR): GCBDR is available to protect applications running in VMware Engine, and can be managed within the Google Cloud Console. We recently launched GCBDR under Google Cloud Platform Terms of Service simplifying customers’ purchasing and support experience.
vTPM support: Google Cloud VMware Engine private clouds now support the addition of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 virtual cryptoprocessor to a virtual machine. You can add vTPMs to VMs by following VMware instructions or upgrading your existing VMs to include a vTPM. You can read more about this in the VMware blog.
This brings us to the end of our updates this time. For the latest updates to the service, please bookmark our release notes.
More Relevant Stories for Your Company
Google’s New Climate Innovation Challenge to Fight Energy Crisis and Build Climate Resilience
At Google, we believe that when it comes to solving a problem as big and urgent as climate change, we get more done when we collaborate. From beekeepers in Germany to urban foresters in Los Angeles, we support the work of nonprofits, scientists, and organizations that are working to mitigate
Towards The Next Wave of Google Cloud Infrastructure Innovation: New C3 VM and Hyperdisk
Meeting the rapidly growing demands of our customers’ high performance computing and data-intensive workloads requires deep innovation — at Google Cloud, we know we can’t rely on ever-faster CPUs alone, like Moore’s Law has enabled in the past. Customers can either optimize their workloads for a given platform, or we
How Google’s Customer Data Platform Helps Retail Brands Offer Data-driven , Personalized CX
Retail companies need customer insights to deliver personalized experiences that impact revenue generation and cost savings. Watch how Google Cloud's customer data platform helps brands integrate and build holistic view of data in silos to drive marketing and customer service success.
Case Study: How Texas’ Largest Grocery Chain Successfully Modernized its Legacy Mainframes
H-E-B, like many enterprises, is moving away from legacy mainframes in favor of microservices and public cloud infrastructure. With hundreds of applications powering their 100+ year-old grocery business (with more than 400 stores in Texas and Mexico), H-E-B needs to be confident that the platform they are building will provide
