Canadian Tire: Revolutionizing customer service with advanced data analytics
About Canadian Tire
Canadian Tire Corporation, Limited, is one of Canada's largest retailers, with operations in automotive, houseware, sports, and other products through its Canadian Tire Retail, SportChek, Mark's, Atmosphere and PartSource brands.
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About Quantum Metric
Quantum Metric, a Google Cloud partner, collects and analyzes first-party digital experience data to help businesses better understand and serve customers throughout their journeys.
Canadian Tire Corporation uses Google Cloud and Quantum Metric to understand its digital engagement with its massive loyalty program and provide exceptional online and in-store customer experiences.
Google Cloud results
- Drives up to 15 percent omnichannel sales increase through more tailored online and in-store experiences
- Democratizes access to insights about customer behavior to improve omnichannel sales, merchandising, and marketing
- Reduces friction across the digital customer journey for better shopping experiences
Supports loyalty program with more than 11 million active members
Retail loyalty programs have come a long way since the days of punch cards. Today, companies are increasingly relying on advanced data-driven solutions to not just maximize the value of their loyalty programs for customers, but also to create the most seamless, optimized experiences at every customer touch point.
Canadian Tire Corporation is one of Canada's biggest retailers, with more than 1,700 stores and gas outlets and 13 businesses and brands—including Canadian Tire Retail, Mark's, SportChek, FGL Sports, and Partsource. It serves customers looking for automotive, sporting goods, houseware, and other products. The company has put a tremendous effort into building one of Canada's largest and most successful customer loyalty programs.
"The scale of our loyalty program is immense, with more than 11 million active members and incredibly granular data related to their interactions with our brands," says Martin Von Wenckstern, Vice President of Personalization, Customer and Digital Analytics at Canadian Tire Corporation. "We have so many opportunities to improve the customer experience thanks to the tremendous efforts of our team to modernize our digital data using the latest technologies."
Canadian Tire Corporation has used BigQuery since 2016 and has now adopted the use of Google Cloud to further expand the sophistication of its loyalty program's digital experience. The company also works with Google Cloud partner Quantum Metric to track, capture, and act upon customer interactions in real time.
"With Google Cloud and Quantum Metric, we will continue to advance our Better Connected strategy with new and improved services to customers, improving our incentives and strengthening our loyalty program to transform engagement with our digital and physical stores."
—Martin von Wenckstern, VP of Personalization, Customer and Digital Analytics, Canadian Tire CorporationGaining a digital understanding of loyalty customers
Canadian Tire had long relied on an on-prem data lake as the foundation of its customer analytics. However, given the sheer volume of digital customer intent data it is now capturing, the company knew it needed to leverage the cloud to harmonize digital customer and offline data sources in real time.
"The big question Google Cloud answered for us was how to marry digital and offline data for a complete, real-time view of our loyalty customers," says Martin. "BigQuery was the clear choice for our data foundation, and we quickly saw the advantages of the many direct integrations supported by Google Cloud."
Google Cloud was also a solid choice given Canadian Tire Corporation's reliance upon Google Analytics and Firebase and the fact that it has for years supported many of its marketing activities with Google applications. The open architecture and high interoperability in Google Cloud gives Canadian Tire the option to more seamlessly adopt new tools as needed.
"Google Cloud offers many built-in features that would take far too much time to implement at scale if we were trying to do this on-prem or considering competing technologies," says Martin.
Since building ingest jobs to move offline sales data into BigQuery, Canadian Tire Corporation has seen significant performance improvements with respect to computing power, productivity, and visualization of digital customer analytics. The unlimited computing power and scalability of Google Cloud allows Canadian Tire to run its diverse customer data-driven strategies with ease.
"The big question Google Cloud answered for us was how to get all of our data into the cloud and build in analytics to marry online and offline data for a complete, real-time view of our customers."
—Ishan Parikh, AVP of Digital Customer Analytics, Canadian Tire CorporationNext-gen visibility into digital customer experiences
A large part of the digital customer experience project was tied to the onboarding of Quantum Metric as a partner. Canadian Tire Corporation looked to Quantum Metric, a Google Cloud partner, to make more of the massive quantities of data now flowing through BigQuery.
With Quantum Metric, Canadian Tire Corporation can capture roughly 600 signals per customer session and respond in real time during online transactions and in-store, driving digital actions to constantly improve the customer experience. Events range from whether inventory images loaded or if backend APIs functioned properly to keep commerce moving ahead—all of which directly impact the quality of customer interactions at every step.
Canadian Tire Corporation now ingests logs from Quantum Metric's interface directly into BigQuery to gain a better understanding of customer journeys. This, combined with its Google Analytics and other marketing tools, tracks everything from omnichannel sales and abandoned carts and beyond to provide insight into any points of possible friction for loyalty customers.
With more than 1,700 retail locations and a massive online presence, Canadian Tire Corporation needed tremendous computing power, intuitive interfaces, and fast analytics to better align loyalty customers' in-store and digital experiences. The combination of Google Cloud and Quantum Metric helps Canadian Tire Corporation understand digital influences on in-store customer outcomes.
"We wanted to have a more granular view of customer engagement that serves up insights in real-time. Quantum Metric has enabled us to achieve that goal," says Ishan.
The years of work building a data-driven approach put Canadian Tire Corporation in a strong position to weather the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. When stores were impacted by shutdowns, the company started to see a lot more website and mobile app traffic from online customer shopping. BigQuery and Quantum Metric gave Canadian Tire Corporation the tools to identify customer issues and resolve them in a short amount of time.
"By using all the automation and powerful capabilities in BigQuery and Quantum Metric, we were able to immediately identify issues and solve them to keep offering loyalty customers the best possible experiences," says Martin. "Without Google Cloud and Quantum Metric, we would not have been able to quickly respond to the challenges facing our online shoppers."
All of these efforts combined to improve customer experiences and build greater loyalty across the company's various brands. At the same time, the huge amount of detail about customer behaviors unlocked more opportunities to improve the company's loyalty program.
"We wanted to have a more granular view of customer engagement that serves up digital insights in real-time. Quantum Metric has enabled us to achieve that goal."
—Martin von Wenckstern, VP of Personalization, Customer and Digital Analytics, Canadian Tire CorporationOptimizing loyalty incentives online and offline
Canadian Tire Corporation now has seamless access to data-driven insights on 11 million loyalty program members and their shopping behaviors over a 12-month period. This combines with transaction history, digital website and app engagement, and other elements related to customer journeys. The company runs tests to understand which elements and incentives have the biggest impacts, such as offering discounts or increased loyalty points on purchases.
Canadian Tire Corporation also ties in open rates on promotional emails, time spent on various websites, and other elements of the customer journey to provide more tailored experiences on apps and websites for loyalty customers. As a result, the company can provide customers with more timely, relevant loyalty offers and recommendations while they shop.
The scale of the company's analytics and personalization efforts is huge, with more than 500 customer data parameters and 100 traits on a single data layer that support rapid changes to experiences. Today, the Canadian Tire Corporation team runs 70 to 80 personalization experiments on a monthly basis, a number they are looking to increase even further with an increasing number of 3rd-party datasets, machine-learning models and onboarding of new technology vendors.
"Google Cloud and Quantum Metric give us the rapid insights to enhance the digital shopping journey of a loyalty customer, and we are seeing omnichannel sales increase by up to 15 percent," says Martin. "The speed with which we can make changes to offers or provide customers with a new experience has been invaluable during high-traffic times like Black Friday and Cyber Monday."
The success of these efforts has increased demand for customer data across sales, merchandising, finance, marketing, and other teams. Today, Canadian Tire Corporation staff across disciplines enjoy advanced insights into customer profiles within seconds.
Democratizing insights to drive customer loyalty
Canadian Tire Corporation is now working to integrate Looker to gain more prebuilt segmentation and modeling tools while looking into Google Cloud machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions. While the company has made immense progress in its ability to serve customers and power a massive loyalty program, it still has other ambitious goals going forward.
"We don't limit the quality of customer services we can provide; it's a moving target and can change regularly," says Martin. "With Google Cloud and Quantum Metric, we will continue to roll out more and better services to customers, improve our incentives and strengthen our loyalty program, and transform experiences engaging with our digital and physical stores."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Canadian Tire
Canadian Tire Corporation, Limited, is one of Canada's largest retailers, with operations in automotive, houseware, sports, and other products through its Canadian Tire Retail, SportChek, Mark's, Atmosphere and PartSource brands.
About Quantum Metric
Quantum Metric, a Google Cloud partner, collects and analyzes first-party digital experience data to help businesses better understand and serve customers throughout their journeys.