Loyal Guru: Helping retailers leverage shopper data to grow customer loyalty with Google Cloud
About Loyal Guru
Blurring the lines between the physical and online worlds, Spain-headquartered Loyal Guru creates omnichannel loyalty solutions for retailers worldwide. Its customer data platform is tailored to each retailer’s individual needs, helping them to maximize sales and take control of their data on a unified modular solution.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usLoyal Guru allows retailers to easily manage their omnichannel customer data with a single view, and to create personalized loyalty campaigns that drive growth and strengthen brand allegiance.
Google Cloud results
- Helps retailers grow and retain their customer base while centralizing and managing customer data in record time
- Helps retailers scale their offer operations x200 with an online and offline redemption rate of 15%
- Enables retailers to create sophisticated loyalty programs and targeted offer campaigns
- Enables non-technical users to create powerful audiences based on huge datasets
- Loyal Guru's business forecast to grow 3x year-on-year as a result of becoming a Google ISV
Boosting supermarket customer spend 10x
Today’s consumers are not only savvier when it comes to shopping around for the best price, they’re also fickle. A 2021 McKinsey report reveals that 35% of U.S. consumers switched brands during the COVID-19 crisis. It’s no wonder retailers are increasingly turning to loyalty programs to strengthen brand allegiance. “Customers often develop a stronger psychological attachment to brands whose loyalty programs they subscribe to and these programs can significantly increase members’ spending and retention rates—if designed correctly,” finds the Harvard Business Review.
“As a lean startup, we were looking for a partner that could grow with us, offered unlimited storage and a host of analytical tools, and Google Cloud ticked all these boxes.”
—Javi Fernandez, co-founder and CIO, Loyal GuruTransforming customer data into activated loyalty campaigns
This mantra has spearheaded the success of Loyal Guru. The customer data platform operator works with retail and grocery clients worldwide to transform their customer data into actionable loyalty programs and personalized offers, boosting off and online spending. CTO Javi Fernandez and CEO Borja Sanfeliu cofounded the business in 2016 after spotting a gap in the technology available for retail transactions. “Grocery has more than 2% in sales online, and that is growing. It's mainly offline. We bring omnichannel capabilities to the market to enable grocers and retailers to understand their customers’ off- and online spending habits,” explains Fernandez.
Loyal Guru initially focused on the grocery sector because this industry is burdened by unique complexities. Grocery shoppers purchase on- and off-line, they may use physical versus digital loyalty cards, and there can be multiple buyers within a single household.
“BigQuery is great for analytic purposes, but we have clients showing real-time receipts on an app, so we need something super quick, and for that, we use Datastore because it’s sub-100 milliseconds.”
—Javi Fernandez, co-founder and CIO, Loyal GuruEnabling a lean team to handle carts full of data with BigQuery
Loyal Guru was born on Google Cloud. “We began as a five-person team and we needed to analyze tons of data to activate campaigns within loyalty programs that were personalized to each of our client’s customers. As every retailer uses their own systems, we needed a robust, multi-tenant scalable solution,” Fernandez says.
“As a lean startup, we were looking for a partner that could grow with us, offered unlimited storage and a host of analytical tools, and Google Cloud ticked all these boxes. And as we have grown to a team of more than 85 people, it is still ticking those boxes.”
Loyal Guru also found that Google Cloud was easier to use and more advanced than competing providers. “We have always used mega-powerful data warehouse systems, and when we started, BigQuery enabled our original team to manage millions and millions of transactions a month without having a DevOps team or a large data analysts department.”
Loyal Guru initially relied on BigQuery and Cloud Storage to store big files and handle client exports and data analysis, and it has gradually adopted several more Google Cloud solutions to further optimize its data to meet its customers’ needs.
The team introduced Datastore, for example, to allow it to store data in different systems, depending on the intended usage. Fernandez says: “BigQuery is great for analytic purposes, but we have clients showing real-time receipts on an app, so we need something super quick and for that, we use Datastore because it’s sub-100 milliseconds.” App Engine was then integrated to process high-performance API’s in real time to POS systems around the world and Pub/Sub was added to manage campaign delivery, sending messages and coupons, for example, to millions of customers.
“We can now obtain information from various purchasing processes to create a 360-degree view of the customer and provide a smarter, more personalized omnichannel customer experience,” says Fernandez. “The Loyal Guru platform allows retailers to run queries on the data collected, segment their customers, and send promotions via email, mobile, and even physical sales receipts. The promotions are then fully integrated with the point-of-sale systems of the retailer, all from within the platform.”
Powering easy-access customized dashboards with Looker
Meanwhile, Firebase is now used to build and run its white-label app solution, and Dataprep by Trifacta and Dataflow are used to further process and prepare data for machine learning. And in 2020, Looker was adopted to display raw data, such as coupon redemptions, category and store performance, and loyalty program performance on easily accessible dashboards for clients. This enables the business to offer clients a more tailored product while allowing the team to focus on developing features, explains Sanfeliu. “We can optimize time and provide retailers with insights quickly. We can then easily adapt dashboards to suit their needs.”
This level of personalization for grocery and retail, specifically, helps Loyal Guru stand out in industries that typically lag behind in customer technology. For example, one of Loyal Guru’s clients is the Spanish supermarket chain, Día, a $10 billion revenue business. As Fernandez explains, Día previously had a completely siloed view of the customer, with no way to track the same customer’s off- and online purchases.
This meant that the same person, for example, was buying Coca-Cola online but not in-store. Without a single customer view, Día’s marketing campaign issued coupons for a product this person was already buying. “They were essentially saying, ‘We know you don't purchase Coca-Cola in store. So here’s a 10% discount for Coca-Cola to buy in-store. But the truth is that this guy was purchasing more than 200 euros a month in Coca-Cola online,” Fernandez says.
The payoffs of successful loyalty schemes are impossible to ignore, adds Sanfeliu. “Whenever a customer is inside a loyalty scheme, they spend ten times more than a customer that is not inside the loyalty scheme.”
Retailers and grocers became acutely aware of the gaps in their loyalty scheme technology during the COVID-19 crisis when off-line outlets had to quickly shift to ecommerce. “Imagine you want to move your sales to online, but you don't know which customer to target and you can’t send any kind of message because you don't have a channel in place?” says Fernandez. This was when many new clients turned to Loyal Guru to create a channel and customize messaging.
Another Loyal Guru client is Spanish fashion retailer, Mango. It wanted to offer a seamless omnichannel loyalty program to its clients across the world. Mango needed to outsmart competitors with a trailblazing omnichannel strategy. So, to strengthen and align its relationship with its customers, Mango created a loyalty program that benefits clients no matter the channel and no matter the country they are buying in. Since working with Loyal Guru, Mango has grown loyalty customers’ sales by 5%.
“Loyal Guru’s ISV relationship with Google Cloud has the potential to help us to increase business by 200% year-on-year. It’s a fantastic partnership.”
—Borja Sanfeliu, co-founder and CEO, Loyal GuruA win-win partnership sees business forecasts grow 200%
The success of Loyal Guru’s platform has also led it to grow its own allegiances with its main technology supporter: Google. Loyal Guru strengthened its partnership with Google in 2021, when it became one of Google’s independent software vendors (ISV). It’s a relationship Sanfeliu describes as mutually beneficial. Loyal Guru encourages its clients to optimize how they use their Loyal Guru platform on Google Cloud, and Google Cloud promotes the startup to its relevant data clients. ”The Google team has facilitated valuable introductions to companies in new markets for Loyal Guru, such as America and Asia,” says Sanfeliu. “Google is highlighting our solution, and it has connections to data teams at many different retail companies.”
For Sanfeliu and Fernandez, one of the most important aspects of their partnership with Google Cloud is transparent promotion. The co-founders describe other experiences with potential partners seeking to white label their services, in stark contrast to their relationship with Google Cloud. “We face people that want to put us behind the scenes, but Google says, ‘Those guys are Loyal Guru. They rely on our technology and they’re great as well.’ They don’t hide us behind a curtain. That’s so important because we need to make sure that we are selling our product under our own name.”
Through their partnership with Google Cloud, Loyal Guru is now courting clients that produce at least ten times the volume of transactions of their average clients. “Loyal Guru’s ISV relationship with Google Cloud has the potential to help us to increase business by 200% year-on-year. It’s a fantastic partnership,” Sanfeliu concludes.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Loyal Guru
Blurring the lines between the physical and online worlds, Spain-headquartered Loyal Guru creates omnichannel loyalty solutions for retailers worldwide. Its customer data platform is tailored to each retailer’s individual needs, helping them to maximize sales and take control of their data on a unified modular solution.