Optimizing the retail experience and developing customer loyalty with advanced analytics

E-commerce transformation has moved at an astounding pace over the last decade. Retailers of all sizes have grappled with immense changes, as new technologies reinvent what's possible and what consumers have come to expect from the shopping experience.

Retailers that embrace evolving shopper expectations by putting customers at the center of everything they do are finding countless opportunities to thrive. 

At Quantum Metric, we help businesses solve many problems, but virtually all of them involve understanding customers through better data visibility and analytics, and then acting on those insights.

Canadian Tire Corporation (CTC), one of Canada’s oldest and largest retailers, is an exciting example of what we have been able to accomplish through our independent software vendor (ISV) partnership with Google Cloud. Since 2018, we have worked with Google Cloud to help CTC build and optimize the digital journey of its Triangle loyalty program, which boasts 11 million active members across the country.

Now, we would like to share how our partnership with Google Cloud helped CTC achieve a 15% omnichannel sales increase by tailoring digital customer experiences.

Why Canadian Tire is a retail leader in Canada

CTC is one of Canada's biggest retailers, with over 1,700 retail and gas outlets, alongside 13 businesses and brands, including Canadian Tire Retail, Mark's, Sport Chek, FGL Sports, and Partsource. In 2022, Canadian Tire celebrated 100 years in business and continued to offer a wide assortment of goods that appeal to Canadians, 90% of whom live within 15 minutes of a retail location.

Even with such an extensive catalog of brands and products, Canadian Tire has always been extremely focused on customers, tailoring many of its business processes to fit the needs, demands, and preferences of the people and communities it serves.

This is why the company recognized the need to leverage the cloud to harmonize increasing digital customer and offline data sources in real-time and offer customers the e-commerce experience they expect.  

Around this time, we began to work with CTC to enable the retailer to more efficiently identify customer pain points, quantify their impact and prioritize action.

CTC was facing common problems in their digital properties, such as difficulties with adding items to the cart, API failures during checkout, and scripts conflicting with each other on certain device and browser combinations, resulting in lower conversion rates and NPS scores.

However, with the implementation of BigQuery and Quantum Metric's advanced data capture technology, CTC was able to automate and expedite identification and resolution of issues affecting customer experience. This allowed for quicker resolution of problems, resulting in improved conversion rates and NPS scores.

To stay ahead of ongoing digital challenges, we now analyze insights fromover 65 million sessions a month across all of CTC’s brands. That’s over 1 terabyte of data every month! This data from customer interactions is then reformatted into behavioral dashboards or individual session replays of the customer’s experience to help CTC teams easily understand the information. We accomplish this by using our patented DOM reconstruction technology to take data and translate it with a focus on security and performance. The result is a 360-view into customer digital activities that enable the Canadian Tire team to fully understand what customers experience on the digital path.

Through the Quantum Metric platform, CTC can quickly identify and address issues impacting customers, ranging from shopping cart checkout problems and promo code issues to slow-loading pages.

Leveraging the power of Google Cloud in retail

Quantum Metric is proud to be built on, and partner with, Google Cloud. By capturing 100% of digital customer interactions even on the busiest days, massive brands like Canadian Tire have complete visibility year-round. This is incredibly important because it allows us to not just fix problems, but also use the full breadth of data to make decisions.

Our use of BigQuery and integration with Google Cloud lets us move away from vague details about customers, engagement averages, and overly broad analytics to uncover exact figures that highlight individual interactions. This was especially beneficial for CTC when the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

When stores shut down, Canadian Tire saw a drop off in its loyalty program engagement because people were not going to stores and did not have an intuitive way to add their loyalty information on websites and apps. Thanks to the power of BigQuery and Quantum Metric’s platform, we helped CTC understand the issue on a granular level. 

Responding to what the data told us, we delivered a new feature that gave customers the flexibility to add their loyalty information at any touchpoint. Once the initial feature was released, Canadian Tire used our session replays and UX analytics to understand customers better and quickly tweak them for greater engagement.

CTC took an iterative approach to improve the feature and, before long, saw a 72% increase in the number of people adding their loyalty information. Rather than seeing engagement drop during an extremely difficult time, Canadian Tire was able to expand its loyalty program with the help of personalization and a customer-centric design approach.

At the end of the day, Quantum Metric’s integration with BigQuery enables Canadian Tire to respond to customer needs, demands, and preferences faster and smarter. Canadian Tire also takes advantage of our unique ability to offer ungated access to all its data in Google BigQuery, as it merges data sets from Google Analytics, transactional information, and Quantum Metric itself.

Quantum Metric got started through the Google Cloud for Startups program and ultimately ended up building highly integrated tools that work seamlessly with BigQuery. We’re capturing petabyte-scale data and allowing companies of all sizes to quickly manage and understand their data, take action, and ultimately drive better experiences and higher sales.

Learn more about how Google Cloud partners can help your business solve its challenges here.