ACSI: Data warehouse, real-time personalisation and InsightOS
The successful implementation of the data warehouse and InsightOS has achieved significant cost savings, streamlined operations, and positioned ACSI as a leading player in the camping industry through data-driven decision-making and enhanced customer experiences.
The Challenge
ACSI, a leading camping specialist, operates multiple websites and platforms, generating a substantial amount of data. To bolster its online business growth and enhance speed and cost-efficiency, ACSI sought a solution that could consolidate all this data into one unified platform in real-time.
Previously, ACSI's data was scattered across various systems, and their operations relied on the reporting facilities of each production application in isolation. Making selections involved manually writing queries from the CRM system to the marketing automation system, resulting in time-consuming processes taking minutes to retrieve customer information. As data volumes increased and queries became more complex, scaling became a significant challenge.
Without an enterprise data warehouse or central reporting, ACSI had to depend on information from various resources, making it challenging to correlate responses from marketing campaigns and booking information with customer behavior on their website. To generate reports, ACSI used excel sheets, combining data from different production applications. Unfortunately, the results lacked the speed and usefulness needed to accurately track and trace web behavior and assess the effectiveness of their CPC strategies.
The Goal
The primary objective was to create a comprehensive data warehouse, capable of aggregating customer data from various touch-points in real-time. By achieving this, ACSI aimed to gain valuable insights from the data to enhance customer experiences and increase customer value. Additionally, they aimed to optimize revenue by saving costs on CPC desk research and develop a system that required little technical maintenance.
The Solution
InsightOS
ACSI had a clear goal in mind - quick access to crucial (cost-per-click) CPC information and maximizing CPC revenue. To achieve this, they implemented InsightOS, a powerful web application developed by Crystalloids on Google BigQuery and Google Apps Engine, featuring bespoke viewers. With just a click of a button, users can now focus on specific data, such as CPC actuals for campings in a particular region or during a specific time frame.
InsightOS offers two specialized viewers, the arrival and booking viewer, specially designed for leisure operators seeking insights into profitability and portfolio management. The arrival viewer provides valuable information on customer arrivals at campsites, which, alongside targeted marketing, helps optimize campsite staff planning. The booking viewer, on the other hand, reveals booking patterns, allowing ACSI to predict call center demand accurately. What once took hours to generate reports, now takes mere seconds to obtain the same valuable answers.
“The most distinguishing feature of InsightOS is its speed,” explains Richard Verhoeff, CEO of Crystalloids. “Google's BigQuery service makes it possible to examine millions of records in seconds. Other business intelligence solutions could take eight minutes to come back with an answer. That’s way too long. Speed is an essential part of our application, and BigQuery Service gives us that."
Data Warehouse: The Foundation of Data-Driven Decisions
Recognizing the significance of data in driving ACSI's business decisions, they embarked on building a robust data warehouse. This data warehouse seamlessly integrates information from various sources, including the reservation system, Google Analytics, and CPC, which were already integrated into InsightOS.
Leveraging a suite of Google Cloud products, customer information from all touch-points is combined in real-time. This includes web data, encompassing visitors' searches and clicks, mailing system engagements with newsletters, mobile app data, surveys, and the CRM system.
Every visitor click or query on ACSI websites is captured in a JSON file and ingested using Cloud Functions and Pub/Sub. Cloud Dataflow streams this data to BigQuery and writes it to Cloud Storage. Within the data warehouse, essential customer details, such as website cookies, hashed and normal email information, and booking IDs, are organized into a user's table.
With all data unified within the data warehouse, ACSI can now analyze and visualize it using BI tools connected to BigQuery. From marketing insights to website personalization, campaign selections to business analytics, an endpoint has been created to facilitate data-driven decision-making across the organization.
In conclusion, InsightOS, combined with the efficiency of the data warehouse, has revolutionized how ACSI harnesses data. Real-time insights enable them to optimize operations, enhance customer experiences, and make informed strategic choices, propelling their online business to new heights of success
The Result
In conclusion, the successful implementation of the data warehouse solution, along with InsightOS, has revolutionized ACSI's approach to managing and utilizing customer data. By bringing together data from websites, CRM systems, marketing automation, mobile apps, and surveys in real-time, ACSI now has a comprehensive understanding of their customers, enabling them to make data-driven decisions that drive their business forward.
With the data warehouse, ACSI can now optimize their business processes, improve efficiency, and enhance customer experiences. The reduction in query response times from several minutes to just seconds with InsightOS has significantly increased productivity and saved valuable time and resources.
Furthermore, InsightOS's user-friendly interface has minimized the need for technical assistance, streamlining operations and resulting in substantial cost savings, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This transformation has positioned ACSI as a leader in the competitive camping industry, setting them apart with their ability to act on customer insights promptly and utilize marketing tools and personalization effectively. Their newfound capacity to harness real-time data insights has driven their online business growth to new heights, empowering them to stay ahead in the dynamic landscape of the camping market.
About ACSI
ACSI is a leading campsite specialist founded in 1965. They provide a camping guide full of useful information, reviews and quality standards of campings within Europe. Their database contains information from more than 9600 campsites. Their website www.eurocampings.eu is, in fact, the most visited camping site in Europe. ACSI operates multiple website brands and apps, including:
- ACSI guide book
- ACSI Club ID
- CampingCard ACSI - a discount card for camping in the low season
- ACSI three mobile apps - ACSI Europe app, CampingCard ACSI app, ACSI Great Little Campsites app
- Suncamp holidays - book a camping place for your holiday
- Eurocampings - Europe’s most visited camping website
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With Crystalloids we have not only found a top service provider but a real IT partner. It is more than just software development. Thanks to the Google Cloud expertise we are able to jointly solve complex cloud issues in the field of big data. It is very nice to work with the Crystalloids team. In terms of communication and quality, everything went smoothly. Crystalloids is highly recommended.”
Niels van Maanen
Marketing Manager ACSI
