Cuts time to generate dashboards and insights from three days to minutes
Instantly alerts retailers to issues and opportunities around customer engagement, enabling immediate action
Increases retailer revenue by 5-6% with automated workflows requiring minimal intervention
Taps into AI for better predictions and recommendations for campaign personalization
Omnichannel customer engagement platform ContactPigeon wanted to enable retailers to visualize all their customer data in one place and build the foundation for hyper-personalization. With BigQuery and Looker, ContactPigeon built a new customer data platform, giving retailers powerful customer insights to enable more effective engagement.
Omnichannel customer engagement platform ContactPigeon wanted to enable retailers to visualize all their customer data in one place and build the foundation for hyper-personalization. With BigQuery and Looker, ContactPigeon built a new customer data platform, giving retailers powerful customer insights to enable more effective engagement.
Right now, there is fierce competition between retailers as they try to appeal to the same customer with the same budget. The store that uses data to target consumers with the right message, meeting that consumer’s need in the moment, will be the one to make the sale.
George Mirotsos
CEO, ContactPigeon
Ecommerce in Europe is thriving. After a period of stabilization following a boom year during the pandemic, sales are now forecast to reach more than $810 billion USD by 2029. However, with more digital retailers entering the market, and many consumers still watching what they spend, online stores have found themselves competing for sales. For George Mirotsos, CEO of ContactPigeon, the key to a digital retailer's success in this market is its ability to use data to engage consumers effectively.
"Right now, there is fierce competition between retailers as they try to appeal to the same customer with the same budget," says Mirotsos. "The store that uses data to target consumers with the right message, meeting that consumer's need in the moment, will be the one to make the sale."
With its award-winning omnichannel customer engagement solution, ContactPigeon helps digital retailers do exactly that: use data to engage with consumers effectively to increase conversions, boost online revenue, and grow their businesses.
Identifying the need for unified customer data
ContactPigeon recently bolstered its offering to customers with the launch of its customer data platform (CDP), built on Google Cloud, giving retailers direct access to their customer data.
Previously, ContactPigeon gathered customer data, such as campaign interactions and ecommerce behaviors, on retailers' behalf and used it to engage customers with personalized messages across key channels, including email, push notifications, and on-site messages. However, retailers had begun asking for the missing piece: a way to analyze and visualize all the data ContactPigeon was collecting, in one place. They knew it would provide powerful, actionable insights into their customers' shopping habits and needs.
"The major challenge retailers were facing was siloed data," explains Joyce Qian, CMO at ContactPigeon. "They had customer data sitting in their enterprise resource planning platform and customer relationship management solution. Their loyalty program was gathering yet more data. They had many gaps in their understanding of how customers interacted with their brand."
Sometimes retailers would ask ContactPigeon for custom reports, but these would often take two to three days to produce, and if they didn't meet the retailer's needs, they would have to start the whole process again.
Fitting the missing piece of the puzzle with Google Cloud
ContactPigeon built its CDP to solve these challenges. It knew that by unifying all customer data sources into a single data warehouse and giving retailers access to business intelligence (BI) tools, it would give retailers the single view they required to gain insights to engage more effectively with customers. As it searched for a data warehouse, ContactPigeon knew it needed real-time data analysis to allow customers to respond quickly. At the same time, it needed a scalable solution to handle the more than half a billion messages it sent every month.
"We liked BigQuery for its scalability and real-time data analysis, but what really stood out was its embedded machine-learning capabilities," says Mirotsos. "Allowing a developer to build models with Vertex AI and Gemini within the BigQuery environment was really appealing."
We liked BigQuery for its scalability and real-time data analysis, but what really stood out was its embedded machine-learning capabilities. Allowing a developer to build models with Vertex AI and Gemini within the BigQuery environment was really appealing.
George Mirotsos
CEO, ContactPigeon
With its native integration with BigQuery and its rapid response times, Looker was the obvious choice as ContactPigeon's BI tool. For Mirotsos, "the combination of BigQuery and Looker is a game-changer," in terms of the data visualization it enables ContactPigeon's CDP to achieve.
A new data platform to unlock powerful customer insights and increase conversions
Recency, frequency, and monetary value analysis is a really important tool for retailers, because they can segment customers based on the lifetime value they provide to the company. With BigQuery ML, retailers can use our platform to predict which customers are most likely to churn, and take a completely different marketing approach for each group.
George Mirotsos
CEO, ContactPigeon
Now, with all their customer data stored in BigQuery, retailers can use the ContactPigeon CDP to generate their own reports on demand, in minutes, rather than waiting days for ContactPigeon to create them. And because they can customize these reports, they can provide relevant answers to the specific questions of any department.
As a result, retailers gain powerful insights, such as around campaign performance or conversion trends, and can spot opportunities, such as where to reduce friction in the conversion journey. With machine learning (ML) built into BigQuery, the ContactPigeon CDP also enables retailers to model forecasts and trends for things, such as product recommendations, and to make strategic business decisions, such as how to optimize marketing budgets for the most impact.
"Recency, frequency, and monetary value analysis is a really important tool for retailers, because they can segment customers based on the lifetime value they provide to the company," explains Mirotsos. "With BigQuery ML, retailers can use our platform to predict which customers are most likely to churn, and take a completely different marketing approach for each group."
Customers that want to dig further into the data can use BigQuery to run queries on the data autonomously to generate even more granular insights. They can even access the ML models to use the data to make their own predictions and forecasts, rather than having to wait for ContactPigeon to create a new model that meets their needs.
Retailers are also able to use Looker's functionality within the CDP to create alerts on their reports to spot relevant insights, patterns, or anomalies as soon as they occur. "This is really important because retailers have to know immediately when there is a problem or an opportunity. Alerts allow them to use these insights to benefit their business,” says Mirotsos.
From data insight to customer engagement
ContactPigeon makes it simple for retailers to act on these insights. With its CDP now connected to its engagement tools, and the option to automate workflows, ContactPigeon enables retailers to instantly transform customer insights into actions. For example, if a retailer has used the CDP to determine a customer's brand loyalty, they can automatically connect with loyal customers every three days with a personalized message to strengthen the relationship. Customers predicted as likely to churn, meanwhile, could be automatically sent a coupon with a personalized message to encourage them to make a purchase.
"ContactPigeon is a platform that combines everything," explains Mirotsos. "We have the data collection, we have the analysis, and we can communicate messages and execute campaigns. So even if a retailer wants to use the platform without investing time to generate new reports or create new campaigns, it can increase the retailer's revenue by 5 or 6% automatically, without any intervention."
Building a future of effortless automation
In the few months since its launch, ContactPigeon’s CDP is already proving its value to retailers, demonstrating how much money they are making with the platform and helping ContactPigeon to retain business. Adoption rates of the CDP are rising fast, along with retailers' desire to learn all about it. Mirotsos describes the third webinar ContactPigeon held as so well attended, "it was like a small conference."
As it continues to expand its product offering, ContactPigeon is working with Google Cloud to integrate more generative AI solutions into its platform. With Gemini, it's powering an AI assistant that allows retailers to automatically generate personalized campaign messaging for customers. It's also developing an AI-powered chatbot to make customer service inquiries more efficient.
With the addition of our CDP, Google Cloud has helped us to completely transform our product, which is huge for us. Now, with Google Cloud AI, we are transforming the program again. It’s going to take a while, but we’re getting there.
George Mirotsos
CEO, ContactPigeon
Consumers, meanwhile, will soon be able to benefit from a shopping assistant that uses Gemini to answer their shopping questions to find the right product as quickly as possible. For Mirotsos, the vision is to "make the job of the marketer as simple as possible, with AI eventually doing around 90% of the work, especially the mundane tasks no one else wants to do."
For Mirotsos, Google Cloud is helping ContactPigeon to redefine what it is able to do for retailers. "With the addition of our CDP, Google Cloud has helped us to completely transform our product, which is huge for us," he says. "Now, with Google Cloud AI, we are transforming the program again. It's going to take a while, but we're getting there."
ContactPigeon is an all-in-one, user-friendly, integrated omnichannel customer engagement platform. Based in Greece, and working with small, medium, and enterprise businesses across Europe, ContactPigeon empowers retailers to connect with customers using scalable, perfectly timed, personalized marketing strategies.
Industries: Retail, Technology
Location: Greece
Products: Google Cloud, BigQuery, Gemini, Looker, Vertex AI
