To expand its customer-centric strategy, Rinascente has implemented a 360° Customer View using Snowflake. By gathering data from its CRM and Digital Analytics platforms, the new Customer Data Hub paves the way for advanced analytics and increasingly data-driven and efficient operations.

Rinascente is a prestigious collection of nine department stores. Each store is a large house of brands and entertainment designed to offer customers a unique experience, thus allowing Rinascente to establish itself as a true Media Company. Customer centricity is deeply embedded in the brand, which focuses on physical stores and its loyalty program as its core elements. It views conversations, on the other hand, as strictly digital and personal.

Rinascente aims to enhance the effectiveness of its customer centricity. Understanding, tracking, and fulfilling the needs of its diverse customer base are central to the brand’s strategy, and can only be achieved through a robust and extensive data foundation.

To make quick and effective customer-centric decisions, it is crucial to have a distinct and comprehensive customer data repository available to the brand. A 360° cross-channel Customer View allows business operators to independently gain insights into their customers, identify audience segments, and implement strategic, marketing, and communication initiatives.

The first step is to build a Customer Data Hub that progressively collects customer data from various business systems. This includes physical stores, Rinascente’s loyalty program, and digital interactions.

With the Customer Data Hub in place, it becomes possible to create a Self-Service BI system for customer analytics. This tool allows business stakeholders to explore the customer knowledge base, which includes sales and loyalty data, as well as information from surveys and web analytics.

With the support of BitBang, the client identifies the architecture needed to enable the desired operations by implementing a Modern Data Stack. This stack adheres to current constraints while providing long-term flexibility and compatibility for future enhancements.

The project is designed with a modular approach from the start. This enables incremental development and expansion in the desired directions, including those not initially planned.

It is not just about selecting, acquiring, and implementing software solutions. The custom-designed and built service elements are crucial for making the project function and expand. They tailor the project to the client’s needs and characteristics, resulting in unique solutions and outcomes.

  • Data Platform: A state-of-the-art native cloud Data Warehouse is the core element for storing data from various sources and ensuring compatibility with a broad range of innovative solutions. Snowflake was chosen for its market leadership, extensive integration capabilities with both advanced and legacy systems, and its robust foundation for developing future projects.
  • Self-Service Modern BI: ThoughtSpot was chosen as the Modern BI solution enhanced by Artificial Intelligence, offering intuitive and in-depth data exploration that is independent of data sources and tailored for business users. This new Self-Service BI tool complements, rather than replaces, the existing tools used for creating standardized, pixel-perfect periodic reports. Its native integration with Snowflake allows for instant querying of data directly on the Snowflake Data Cloud.
  • Data Engineering: The Data Engineering team has designed and optimized custom, stable, near real-time pipelines, ensuring the anonymization of personal data and appropriate visibility filtering. This approach results in high-quality data for analysis, maintains this quality over time, and ensures compliance and privacy protection. In this phase, the team experimented with both custom tools and APIs, as well as tools provided by other components, to ensure seamless integration.
  • Data Culture: On-the-job training activities are implemented to cultivate a Data Culture aligned with the business’ specific challenges. This involves developing methods and approaches that address the team’s needs while simultaneously enhancing familiarity with and expertise in the newly introduced tools.

Customer data from Rinascente’s CRM and loyalty program are modeled into a Customer Data Model with Snowflake and imported. Transactional data are sourced directly from the applications that generate them and integrated through custom data pipelines.

During the next step, the Customer Data are enhanced with digital data from additional sources.

The 360° Customer View is now accessible through custom-designed Modern BI dashboards for enhanced data visualization and exploration. ThoughtSpot is integrated with existing tools, broadening users’ capabilities to interact with the available data.

A comprehensive 360° Customer View is now available to the brand. This enables cross-source analysis, eliminates existing data silos, and supports self-service BI for business users, thereby reducing the technical team’s workload.

Rinascente has laid a solid foundation for future advancements, whether it involves integrating new data sources and types, conducting advanced analyses, or utilizing data to drive the customer-centric strategy that defines the brand.

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Matteo Gabanini

“Thanks to this development, Rinascente will have a single, customer-centric, cross-channel data base, which will be a fundamental asset for achieving future business goals”.

Matteo Gabanini

Rinascente, Integration & Data Area Manager