The 1 enhances loyalty program with faster, deeper member insights
100% increase in Tableau users over four years
50% reduction in time to refresh data using Tableau Hyper API
Engagement with campaigns and offers is now optimized using Tableau to test and learn
The 1 is Thailand’s number one digital lifestyle and loyalty platform with more than 19 million members. The 1 connects these members with more than 2,000 brands to provide them with the best experiences and privileges. These brands include Central Group brands such as Central and Robinson department stores as well as partner brands such as Grab and Caltex.
The 1 aims to be known as ‘Your Everyday Lifestyle Application’ for members and merges its expertise in data insight, MarTech, and CRM to deliver the best experience in digital. It uses Tableau to better understand members so that it can offer products and promotions tailored to their needs and interests. Tableau is also used to monitor the performance of campaigns and to identify opportunities for growth.
Tableau has played a broader role in making data more accessible and fostering data-driven decision making at all levels of the organization.
Through using Tableau, we can understand our data and make accurate decisions based on fact, rather than guessing or relying on feelings. In this way, it gives us an advantage over our competitors.
Making data analytics self-service
Prior to adopting Tableau, The 1 relied on the data team to provide everyone with the information they needed to make decisions. Requests for information were put into a queue and teams often had to wait almost 36 hours for a response. In addition, data management was time consuming given the large amount of data held for analytics.
The 1 decided to adopt Tableau in order to allow teams to access and visualize their own data. Tableau was chosen in part because of its strong community where users at all levels can go to ask questions or find answers within existing posts online. The 1 also found hundreds of hours of training videos online to help facilitate adoption.
BAC, a Tableau implementation partner, was engaged to provide on-site training to IT and infrastructure teams. The rest of the business leveraged resources from the Tableau community as well as the intuitive nature of the platform to learn and grow their own data skills.
In the four years since The 1 first adopted Tableau, the number of users has increased by more than 100%. The organization now has more than 200 employees using Tableau to access and analyze data on their own. These included employees from various departments such as Marketing, Operations, and Purchasing.
“Tableau presents data visually and in a way that’s easy to understand, so the business can self-serve and view performance by business, by branch or by product category,” said Chartsatienpong.
With this type of information more accessible, the data team is freed up from basic reporting to focus on in-depth analysis. For example, they can analyze purchases and points usage to better understand member behavior and how to design more relevant and engaging campaigns. Every campaign is measured as well, so The 1 can test and learn by comparing the effectiveness of different tactics and messages. Campaigns and offers can then be improved to optimize results.
Tableau presents data visually and in a way that’s easy to understand, so the business can self-serve and view performance by business, by branch or by product category.
Accelerating time to insight
As The 1 progressed in its Tableau journey, it had to increase the efficiency of data management. The organization holds hundreds of millions of records which need to be accessed regularly for data analytics and refreshing this data into Tableau took up to six hours.
The 1 decided to move its data into AWS Redshift and leverage Apache Parquet for more efficient data storage and retrieval. Supported by BAC, The 1 then installed the Tableau Hyper API to extract data from the Apache Parquet files.
Now, data refreshes can be completed in just two or three hours and resource consumption of Tableau Server has been greatly reduced.
“With advice and guidance from BAC, we can now manage big data more efficiently and ensure high availability of Tableau,” said Chartsatienpong.
In the future, The 1 sees Tableau supporting a greater focus on testing and learning so that it can optimize campaigns and business tactics and establish best practices. The 1 also anticipates an increasing use of AI and machine learning.
“Descriptive analytics such as sales monitoring or KPIs will be the basics that every company needs and with Tableau, they will be prepared with less resources and effort,” said Chartsatienpong. “At the same time, AI and machine learning will be increasingly used for activities such as customer segmentation and product recommendations. We see this type of analysis becoming easier and anticipate Tableau having a role to play.”
