How Kibo Commerce wows their customers with composable analytics using Looker

The pandemic transformed how consumers and the retail ecosystem interact and do business with one another. From exclusive online shopping and curbside pick up to the return of footfall in physical stores—engagement, operations, and expectations have changed. Consumers want seamless shopping experiences, regardless of where their shopping begins and ends. Retail, distribution, and manufacturing data consumption has also evolved and a new approach is required to best meet customer and business needs. This is why retailers, manufacturers, and distributors are turning to Kibo Commerce. Our hosted digital commerce solution provides integrated omnichannel services including product and catalog management, unified cart and checkout, inventory management, distributed order routing, and operational and business insights.

What really sets Kibo apart is the level of composability we offer to meet the specific needs of every client. Our "headless" platform's modular and API-first architecture enables customers to tailor their Kibo system's interface to deliver the type of experiences they want. Kibo's “composable” microservices also make it easy to add and modify features and functions to support changing requirements.

How Kibo became a B2C and B2B commerce solution leader

Our customers like to track information such as products available for curbside pickup, the number of new shoppers each week, consumer demographics, geographic trends, and discretionary spending versus spending on staples. To deepen and extend our data capabilities, we added composable analytics to our platform with Google Cloud’s Looker business intelligence (BI) product. Since we've adopted Looker, we've gone from delivering average insights and analytics to best-in-class offerings. The differentiated reporting, analytics, and insights capabilities that Kibo Commerce delivers by using Looker are key reasons why our company is singled out as the only leader in The Forrester Wave™: B2C Commerce Solutions, Q2 2022 report.

Self-service analytics needed for dynamic customer experiences and journeys

With our previous BI solution, tailoring insights and embedding analytics required too much effort, including a lot of repetitive coding. And our customers and our employees were often making decisions based on limited data from cookie-cutter reports and dashboards that didn’t address their unique business KPIs and goals.

After evaluating many BI solutions, we chose Looker. Its self-service and extensibility capabilities enable us to deliver composable insights and analytics that users can explore and tailor to meet their unique needs. True to its name, Looker also provides sleek, easy-to-use experiences that elevate our insights to all audiences including executives, and shorten learning curves compared with alternative technologies.

Architecturally, Looker seamlessly integrates with our existing cloud infrastructure. With Looker's competitive feature set, we also improve control over data access and can expand pricing models with optional embedded analytics.

On-demand customizations based on governed data models

Our customers can now get the insights that they want, when they want them, from their transactional, inventory, and subscription data and, optionally, from information supplied by third-party partners. From their Kibo environment, they can access custom reports and dashboards, as well as explore their real-time, governed data using different filters such as location, time period, and channels. They can also create new trusted dashboard tiles and adjust goal metrics.

At any time, customers can modify and create production-ready reports to meet their needs, using their governed data that's modeled, which ensures accuracy, establishes consistency, and fosters trust. And our customers also innovate on their own by building experimental reports using Looker—and their trusted data model—as a safe sandbox environment.

Customers increase ROI with automated alerts

Another differentiated value we provide with our platform's embedded analytics are configurable alerts made possible with the real-time data capabilities in Google Cloud. Now one of Kibo's most impactful features, our real-time alerts enabled by Looker help us to meet our customers' expectations for instant data insights—and help them to realize massive ROI. That's because alerts can make our customers aware of issues, anomalies, and successes as they are happening, rather than after the fact, so that they can respond at the moment of relevance and deliver consistently excellent experiences. For example, a real-time alert about a backed-up shipment could trigger a new order with a different product supplier so that the store can keep its shelves stocked, provide the inventory shoppers want, and meet monthly revenue projections.

Innovating 99 percent of the time to improve services

Kibo's business model has always been extensible, and with Looker, our analytics model now is too. Our core BI analytics development team spends 99 percent of their days innovating and building new services and reusable components, and almost no time creating repetitive or ad hoc reports. Kibo's product and sales teams are also improving the ROI of promotions and development efforts by using Looker to increase insights into customers' usage of our platform's features.

Our success is directly tied to those of our customers. Thanks to our partnership with Looker and Google Cloud, Kibo's leaders and our customers have a transparent and consistent view of their business metrics so that we all can continuously evolve our omnichannel services in a way that drives growth.