Cheerz: Using data insights to make customer experience part of the bigger picture
About Cheerz
Cheerz is a photo-printing application that helps 4 million global customers turn memories into more than 75 personalized products, such as photo books, prints, and magnets. It is available via its website and two mobile apps. Recording €50 million in revenue in 2020, the company’s ambition is to become the European leader in mobile photo printing.
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Contact usCheerz was struggling to obtain valuable insights from its data after difficulties scaling up under a third-party cloud solution, so it turned to Google Cloud to solve this problem.
Google Cloud results
- Brings data from more than 20 sources onto a single repository with BigQuery
- Eliminates time-out errors for complex data query operations; these had previously failed more than 50% of the time
- Billions of rows processed on a daily basis
- 100% success rate with BigQuery, and query takes less than three minutes to run
- Enables granular analysis of user behaviors to improve experiences
- Reinvigorates passion for data-driven insights among colleagues
Powers a 93% reduction in data insight query times
Capturing magical life moments has never been easier, thanks to rapid improvements in the quality of smartphone cameras. Yet, these special moments can easily get lost in the digital quagmire of a misplaced USB, a failed hard drive, or an obsolete device. Cheerz solves these problems. It prints physical copies of cherished memories for its customers on a range of products. This attractive offering led the company to take €50 million in revenues in 2020.
“Millions of customers use our apps and website, so we generate lots of data. Cheerz needed a platform that was capable of processing this information at high speed in order to provide useable insights. Google Cloud was by far the strongest performer in benchmarking.”
—Kevin Bhurtun, Data Lead, CheerzCheerz had one problem, however. Data is central to its business, but its legacy infrastructure struggled with the demands of processing all of the additional information generated by its burgeoning customer interactions. In early 2021, Cheerz turned to Google Cloud for a solution.
“Millions of customers use our apps and website, so we generate lots of data. Cheerz needed a platform that was capable of processing this information at high speed in order to provide useable insights. Google Cloud was by far the strongest performer in benchmarking,” explains Kevin Bhurtun, Cheerz’s Data Lead, who is responsible for providing Cheerz’s business teams with data so that they can make more impactful decisions.
As part of his role, Bhurtun is responsible for building and maintaining any associated infrastructure. He tried to optimize his existing third-party cloud setup but only made small gains in performance. He realized that the existing platform was unable to scale sufficiently to meet Cheerz’ continuing and projected growth. Having benchmarked a number of data warehousing solutions, he decided Google Cloud was the right choice.
“The fact that BigQuery runs by itself without having to spend a lot of time on administration and configuration was a big plus for me, to say nothing of the incredible performance that was our primary reason for selecting it as our data warehouse solution.”
—Kevin Bhurtun, Data Lead, CheerzStoring and transforming data with BigQuery
When it came to choosing a data warehouse to store and manage all this information, Bhurtun felt BigQuery was the right solution to act as a central repository for all its data. BigQuery now amalgamates data from more than 20 sources, including relational databases and Saas tools, which are streamed hourly, and events data, which streams live.
Data from third-party sources is also imported on a daily basis, using the BigQuery Data Transfer Service, and Cheerz uses the compute power of BigQuery to transform its raw data for analysis, using the extract, load, and transform method. Bhurtun explains: “As compute and storage are near-infinitely scalable on BigQuery, we load all the raw data directly into the warehouse and perform SQL-based transformations in self-service when needed.”
Bhurtun and the team have now gained complete control over how Cheerz data is stored, by further optimizing complex queries through partitioning and clustering. The serverless nature of BigQuery and the decoupling of compute and storage means most queries can run in less than 10 seconds.
They are also able to send a large volume of concurrent queries without generating a long queue, something their previous setup was unable to accommodate. This process is complemented by a reduction in the time spent administering and optimizing the new data solution.
“The fact that BigQuery runs by itself without having to spend a lot of time on administration and configuration was a big plus for me,” Bhurtun adds, “to say nothing of the incredible performance, which was our primary reason for selecting it as our data warehouse solution.”
Analyzing and visualizing data with Looker
Once data is ready for analysis, Cheerz uses Looker to monitor key performance indicators and to model and visualize data. This helps it to better understand different trends among its customers’ behaviors. Each member of the team has access to their own dashboards and specific reports that they are able to build themselves in self-service and monitor throughout the day.
Under the previous setup, Bhurtun says that the team had a fairly static view of their data. Queries took a long time to return and suffered from an increasingly high failure rate. This was inconvenient and meant the company lost out on valuable insights, something it had prided itself on in the past. And the situation was having a further stultifying effect, causing employees to lose interest in data, particularly when it came to business intelligence, as they were unable to run their own analyses.
Now the time in which it takes Cheerz colleagues to access business performance data using Lookers’ Explore feature has been reduced by roughly 93%, from approximately 92 seconds down to around seven. Complex queries also run without timing out, allowing Bhurtun and the team to uncover additional insights, without having to wait minutes for their dashboards to load, and without any increase in cost per query.
This allows Cheerz to “slice and dice” the data, as Bhurtun puts it, in a granular way. The team can examine trends in greater detail, such as which features customers choose most frequently when they build personalized photo products using Cheerz. As a result, Cheerz can further refine its offering to better meet the expectations of its customers.
“Colleagues have been pleasantly surprised by the drastic improvements in performance since partnering with Google Cloud. They get instant access to data and can perform exploratory analyses to understand the ‘why’ behind trends they’ve uncovered. People are really excited for the future.”
—Kevin Bhurtun, Data Lead, CheerzOptimizing performance with Firebase
As well as a better understanding of its customers overall, data also enables Cheerz to examine individual customer interactions in greater detail. Using Firebase Crashlytics, Cheerz can monitor crashes on its apps, and using Google Analytics for Firebase, it can further understand how its users engage with its digital products.
This is particularly useful when it comes to analyzing the company’s conversion funnel. Google Analytics for Firebase allows Cheerz to understand each customer’s journey through its website and applications to determine whether any issues occurring during the customer journey may have prevented them from ordering and to implement a fix where necessary.
“At Cheerz, customer experience is at the core of our business,” Bhurtun adds. “Behavioral data helps us understand whether our users are encountering friction on our apps/website and identify high-value opportunities. While product analytics allow us to build the right things and build them right.
“Since there's a native connection between Firebase Analytics and BigQuery, we did not have to build a custom pipeline to get access to the raw events data. We now have this valuable information at our fingertips in real time.”
Looking to the future
Data has been at the heart of Cheerz since its inception, and the company’s refurbished cloud infrastructure has rekindled this passion, Bhurtun believes. “Colleagues have been pleasantly surprised by the drastic improvements in performance since partnering with Google Cloud,” he says. “They get instant access to data and can perform exploratory analyses to understand the ‘why’ behind trends they’ve uncovered. People are really excited for the future.”
Cheerz soon hopes to adopt Google Kubernetes Engine to replace its current third-party provider and bring its extract, load, and transform process in-house, creating a bespoke solution using open-source software.
Bhurtun says he is particularly keen on leveraging native integrations between BigQuery and other Google Cloud services already used by the company, including Looker, Google Marketing Platform, and Cloud SQL. He’s also hoping to explore the possibilities offered by more advanced analytics, using Google Cloud’s machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities.
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About Cheerz
Cheerz is a photo-printing application that helps 4 million global customers turn memories into more than 75 personalized products, such as photo books, prints, and magnets. It is available via its website and two mobile apps. Recording €50 million in revenue in 2020, the company’s ambition is to become the European leader in mobile photo printing.