Tchibo brews up 10x faster customer insights with AlloyDB for PostgreSQL

Tchibo, a well-known coffee retailer and lifestyle brand based in Germany, needed a faster, smarter way to manage and interpret vast amounts of customer feedback across its diverse product offerings and sales channels. To meet this need, they adopted the AlloyDB for PostgreSQL database, harnessing its advanced analytics and AI capabilities to streamline data retrieval and provide real-time insights. 

In this guest post from Henning Kosmalla and Dominik Nowatschin, we learn how Tchibo’s migration accelerated feedback analysis by a factor of 10, empowering Tchibo’s teams to respond quickly to customer needs and reinforcing the company’s commitment to customer-centric innovation.

At Tchibo, we’re about more than just coffee — we’re constantly brewing new ways to connect with our customers.

We’ve grown from a coffee-focused business to a multi-channel retail model, spanning our own stores, e-commerce, and shop-in-shop sections in grocery stores. This setup allows us to serve a diverse customer base, each with unique needs and preferences, while offering an evolving selection of non-food items — from apparel to kitchenware — delivering “a new world every week.”

But it’s not always a smooth pour. Rising global challenges, from inflation to new AI-driven customer expectations, require us to make data-driven decisions quickly to stay competitive. Our previous cloud database solution could handle basic data retrieval, but it couldn’t keep up with the scale and complexity of the data we rely on across our three sales channels. As our data needs grew, we faced a number of issues: our query speeds slowed which delayed access to customer data, we suffered from labor-intensive feedback compilation, and we had difficulty extracting actionable insights from diverse data sources.

Queries often exceeded 10 seconds, even for straightforward insights. And compiling customer feedback reports required up to three days of manual work to sort, categorize, and analyze. We also lacked the flexibility to support advanced, AI-driven applications. This limited our ability to implement innovative tools like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflows, which combine structured and unstructured data for deeper context in AI queries. That’s why we turned to AlloyDB — to power the insights that keep customers at the center of every decision we make.

Finding the perfect blend of speed and scale

AlloyDB provided a powerful solution to the limitations we faced with our old database. Its advanced analytics capabilities, built-in vector search, and familiar PostgreSQL foundation offered the speed, adaptability, and usability we needed to serve up insights as fresh and fast as our coffee. One of our most impactful applications, Customer Voice, gives employees instant access to relevant customer feedback. This tool compiles data from product reviews and other sources into actionable summaries, answering questions like, “How do customers feel about our new coffee pad machine?” with concise, actionable summaries.

AlloyDB serves as the foundation of our Customer Voice application, managing a complete data pipeline to support real-time feedback analysis. Its architecture efficiently handles data storage, search, and query processing, so Tchibo teams can gain fresh perspectives from customer insights. Here’s how AlloyDB supports our specific needs:

• Data storage: AlloyDB organizes customer feedback and product meta-information in a flexible structure, supporting both standard and advanced queries. This setup allows us to run traditional queries (e.g., “return all reviews with a positive sentiment”) as well as nearest-neighbor (NN) searches using embedding columns to add depth and relevance to the data.
• Query interpretation: When employees pose questions to the Customer Voice assistant, a large language model (LLM)—currently Claude 3.5 Sonnet on Vertex AI—interprets the query, identifying core topics like product or category to deliver targeted, relevant answers.
• Retrieval and filtering: AlloyDB combines structured queries, NN searches, and reranking/filtering steps to retrieve relevant reviews. The LLM further enriches the data with clustering and summary statistics, providing a full view of customer opinions.
• Presentation: Customer Voice delivers these insights through a streamlined interface that highlights individual reviews, key statistics, and summaries, making it easy for employees to act on the information.

Serving data to perfection to fuel decision-making

AlloyDB has transformed Tchibo’s approach to data by enabling faster, deeper, and more scalable access to the customer feedback and analytics we rely on for decision-making. 

Supporting high-performance analytics and RAG workflows, AlloyDB now delivers nearly instant insights. Complex queries that once took up to 10 seconds now return results in about a second, enabling faster, data-driven decisions across teams. Generating detailed customer feedback reports previously took days of manual effort. With AlloyDB, this process now takes seconds. This leap has strengthened our commitment to staying connected to customer needs and preferences in real time.

Furthermore, the fully managed operation of AlloyDB has reduced operational overhead, simplifying our ability to scale as data demands grow. Although continuity wasn’t our primary consideration in choosing AlloyDB, its 99.99% SLA availability provides valuable reliability for supporting long-term goals.

Beyond Customer Voice, AlloyDB also supports broader AI initiatives, such as an internal chatbot for intranet queries, giving us the flexibility to scale various retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) use cases efficiently across the organization. Looking forward, we’re exploring expanded AlloyDB capabilities to integrate more structured and unstructured data into our analytics. Partnering with Google Cloud, we’re positioned to explore new data solutions to serve up richer insights, driving growth and innovation at Tchibo.

Ready to get started with AlloyDB in your own environment? Check out the following resources:

• Discover how AlloyDB combines the best of PostgreSQL with the power of Google Cloud in our latest e-book.

• Try AlloyDB at no cost for 30 days with AlloyDB free trial clusters!

• Learn more about AlloyDB for PostgreSQL.