Founded in 2000 by Dutch CEO Raymond Cloosterman, cosmetic brand Rituals has grown excessively; from one store in the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam to more than 500 stores, more than 1500 shop-in-shops and four urban wellness centres in 26 countries all over the world. The company was the fastest growing company in the Netherlands in the period of 2012-2016*.
The retail company offers a combination of home and body cosmetics in their stores and on their website rituals.com. Rituals unites advanced technology with ancient far Eastern rituals to present a range of affordably priced products that turn everyday routines like bathing and shaving into meaningful rituals.
*(The Top 250 Scale-ups 2017, The Netherlands)
To keep on growing within their field, Rituals is innovating continuously. They are known to be frontrunners when it comes to business intelligence and big data processes. Rituals has been focussing on the back end of the company, by optimising their ICT projects and big data management systems, in the last few years. In 2015 they approached Crystalloids because they were looking for a customer & product data management solution in the cloud.
As a fast-growing company, big data management is essential for Rituals. The company worked with many different data sources and data storage locations, some of them on-premise, some of them not. The more Rituals was growing, the more difficult it became to make sense of all this data.
As the company wanted to become a leader in information technology and big data field, they wanted all their data to be accessible from every different touch points. They wanted their system to be flexible, easily adaptable to their needs, and they wanted a single customer view, instead of a fragmented one. And of course, lowering their IT costs would be a nice bonus.
One of the problems they were facing was the difficulty to bring together the on- and offline purchase data of their customers and link this information in real time to one identity.
Based on InsightOS' platform core components, loyalty and contact services, Crystalloids implemented the Rituals Google Cloud. By integrating every possible data source, like Exact, Demandware, Salesforce and Selligent and through different API’s built on the Google Cloud, Crystalloids created the company's own data management platform.
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Potential new customers can register themselves for the loyalty program in the store or online. After submitting their personal information via a form and confirming this through an email, they get a customer a token assigned: a unique digital barcode which can be scanned at every selling point. Completing this process the person becomes a registered customer to Rituals.
Using the token at every purchase transaction, the customer receives a loyalty email with its digital receipt and loyalty points. The customer also starts receiving emails and communication from Rituals through online and mobile platforms. The information they get is based on their past behaviour and gives personalised recommendations which will make their shopping experience more relevant.
Having all the historical information about the customer in one place also helps the customer service to provide better service to the loyalty members.
Immediately after a customer signs up, their information is being processed and distributed to the Google Cloud (both Google Cloud Datastore and Google BigQuery) for direct presentation in the front end or for ad-hoc analysis.
All the information can interact through different API’s that give access to various touch-points like the store scanner, computers, tablets, and phones of the customer and the production server of Rituals. Thanks to this, it is possible to always have real-time information ready about customers and products.
The storage of data all at one place makes the product and customer analysis for internal engineers and data scientists easier with the help of BigQuery. Marketing analysts can benefit from interfaces that display dashboards, predictions and data exploration search bars together with business intelligence tools like ClickQ & Tableau.
In the Rituals' Google Cloud, members with more than one identity are still linked together as one. For example, when a customer registered with two different email addresses and uses two loyalty cards, they will still be recognised as one customer in the analytics.
Based on the InsightOS platform core components and loyalty and contact services, Crystalloids implemented the Rituals Google Cloud: the company's own data management platform. Through different API’s, built on the Google Cloud, Crystalloids integrated every possible data source, like Exact, Demandware, Salesforce and Selligent.
Rituals can now gather and store all the data information about customers and products at one place, making sure all the information is available for all different touch-points in real-time.
To help create a single view of the customer, Crystalloids implemented a customer loyalty program at Rituals. Being part of the program, the customers receive a free welcome gift, free online shipping, inspirational emails, personal surprises and a gift with every purchase.
Thanks to the program Rituals can capture real-time customer’s data from all their stores and touch-points and keep these in the Google data lake and in this way combining on- and offline customer data.
In the end, the Google Cloud Platform in combination with the customer loyalty program gives Rituals a way to do better product & customer analyses. It gives them a way to optimise their stock inventory and helps them to improve the customers' targeting.
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"Crystalloids is already for years a strategic partner for Rituals. Their key focus is data, they created our Information Lake and made it the strategic heart of the IT landscape. Crystalloids
Nico Wartenbergh
CTO, Rituals Cosmetics
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