MandM Direct migrates to Google Cloud to utilise data and improve customer experiences
Online fashion retailer MandM Direct began in 1987 as a catalogue-based mail order service, before transforming to an online-only retailer several years ago. The business now has over 3 million active customers across Europe.
The nature of the business means that the company gathers a huge amount of data about customers and, until recently, paid a third party to analyse its data and relied on them to reveal insights. However, MandM Direct realised that this wasn’t the best way to utilise its data and make the best business decisions. As a result, the company decided to make some changes.
Damian Evans, CEO, MandM Direct said: “It was clear to us that we’ve always had a lot of data and it made sense to bring it together to try and better understand our customers. We wanted to start pulling it all together in one place, to see the patterns and connections it contained.”
The company updated its infrastructure to Google Cloud to make the best use of the data and to take advantage of other tools that Google Cloud provides such as App Engine, Cloud Spanner, and Pub/Sub. Once migrated, the team were able to gather the data under one roof and harness the tools to properly utilise it.
Mark Godwin, IT Director at MandM Direct said: “There are two types of data in our systems. There's the data that tells you what you did, and the data that you use to tell you what to do. Once you’ve got the fact-based repository built up, you can then start to mine, analyse, and visualise interrelationships between the data to help you make better decisions.”
The retailer now uses Google’s data warehouse, BigQuery, to gather and store data from millions of customers’ journeys within the MandM Direct website. It records every item viewed, every payment made and every confirmed dispatch in real-time. Looker is then used to spot patterns, visualise and analyse data and ultimately inform business decisions.
Tom Goode, Customer and eCommerce Director, MandM Direct said: “Looker has been a game-changer for us. It makes the data we have access to even more readily available, relevant, and timely. We use the insights it provides to streamline each journey our customers take across the website.”
Other tools within Google Cloud can be used to produce real-time reporting on deviations from target KPIs, configure custom monitoring alerts and generate automatic email notifications flagging friction for customers.
“We are always interested in what advances are happening across other sectors, and Google has that visibility, and those are some of the really interesting conversations we have with them. For us, it’s a very beneficial, worthwhile relationship. The more you put in, the more you get out,” added Damian Evans.
