How to Deliver an Omnichannel Customer Experience by Leveraging Geospatial Data

In the last few years, more and more data has become available from sensors, customer’s devices, and transactions—much of it with time and location information. Organizations are eager to analyze this goldmine of information and visualize the results on maps.

However, if you’ve ever tried to leverage this data with a traditional database, you most likely quickly learned that 1) most databases simply aren’t designed to perform large-scale geospatial analytics in a reasonable amount of time, and 2) these databases can’t visualize large geospatial datasets with any sort of interactivity.

So how can you leverage geospatial data in order to understand your customers better in this new world of extreme data? Organizations need an insight engine that’s powerful enough to handle this data and also deliver incredibly fast, accelerated analytics. Kinetica is able to do this by tapping into the thousands of processing cores of NVIDIA GPUs.

In our recent webinar, How Lippo Group Leverages Geospatial Data to Understand their Customers Better, participants from Kinetica, OVO Lippo Digital, and NVIDIA discussed how Lippo Group was able to leverage OVO, their smart digital channel, and Kinetica’s GPU-powered insight engine to generate 360-degree views of their customers from multiple industry data sources. By doing this, OVO was able to interact with these customers in a personalized way, while also opening up new revenue streams with data monetization.

What Led us to this New World of Extreme Data?

It’s clear that we have moved beyond the world of big data. We’ve experienced a pronounced shift from the service economy, which was informed by data, to the Extreme Data Economy, which runs on it. Three key factors have led to today’s world of extreme data:

1. Algorithms have been getting smarter and smarter.
2. In order to compete, companies must extract insight from big data much faster.
3. The compute capabilities of processors have quickly grown.

The combination of these three elements have enabled the growth of machine learning and deep learning, where GPU-powered insight engines are being used to compute complex algorithms to extract intelligence and information out of big data sets. This ability enables organizations to analyze massive sets of complex data at unparalleled speed. The result? Businesses are able to act on data in real time, instead of reacting to the data hours or days later.

Before we dive into the details of how Lippo Group is able to leverage geospatial data to generate 360-degree views of their customers, let’s take a look at how NVIDIA and Kinetica enable this ability. The graphic below shows how complex queries being analyzed by Kinetica are offloaded to NVIDIA GPUs, so they don’t become a bottleneck of sequential queries that are processed by CPUs. All offloaded queries are complex algorithms that are executed extremely fast on thousands of GPU cores. The results are then returned back to the CPU. By offloading complex and computation-intensive queries to the GPU, the GPU is freed up to do normal sequential operations.

NVIDIA recently experimented with deploying Kinetica on their GPUs, and the results speak for themselves. NVIDIA sped up an incredible 100,000x using Kinetica’s insight engine for different types of queries performed on 150 billion rows. They were able to query 1.3 billion objects within a fraction of a minute, using a 10-node Kinetica cluster against 30 terabytes of data. This dramatically demonstrates how Kinetica leverages NVIDIA’s GPU cores to analyze complex queries.

The Challenge: Connecting the Dots of Customer Behavior

Now let’s dive into the details of how Lippo Group was able to use Kinetica to introduce new and personalized experiences to customers in real time. Lippo Group is one of the largest conglomerates in Indonesia, with a diverse portfolio of businesses spanning real estate, retail and department stores, financial services, telecommunications, hospitality, healthcare, and media, among others. The challenge was that most of the businesses within Lippo Group had their own loyalty programs, so they were not connected to each other.

Solution: Harnessing Extreme Data to Shape the Customer Experience

To solve this problem, Lippo Group is consolidating and analyzing the subsidiary-fragmented data on one centralized analytics platform, where they can generate a 360-degree view of the customer profile and journey. This includes not just a 360-degree view of the customer from one industry such as a department store chain, but all Lippo Group channels across multiple industries. This allows them to really understand the consumer’s preferences across industries, so they can offer this consumer more customized services and products.

Through Kinetica’s insight engine, Lippo Group is able to consolidate multiple dimensions of customer attributes, including demographics and cross-channel buying behaviour such as social media sentiment and in-store/online interactions. Lippo Group will be able to correlate customer, transaction, and location information, and by using geospatial analytics, will deliver actionable insights for Lippo Group business units, resulting in a better understanding of each unit’s business performance.

With a big data API and AI platform in place, all Lippo Group touchpoint channels can introduce new and personalized experiences to customers in real time. By implementing Kinetica, Lippo Group’s touchpoint channels are able to execute queries on huge volumes of rich data sets through an analytic API in sub-second latency. With the support of Kinetica and NVIDIA, Lippo Group Digital will be the first enterprise to integrate an AI, in-memory GPU database in Indonesia.

Next Step: Monetization

Lippo Group plans to roll out a big data monetization project over the next few years. By combining Kinetica’s insight engine with the OVO Smart Digital Channel, businesses will be able to interact with customers in a personalized way, while also opening up new revenue streams with data monetization.

The graphic below shows what Lippo Group is currently doing to monetize data. NVIDIA GPUs allow users to create an API marketplace for various data analytics operations using Kinetica, leading to new complex query possibilities.

Delivering Targeted Offers Using Kinetica

The underlying technology consists of a Hadoop big data cluster and a next-gen API cluster with Kinetica:

Geospatial Analysis with Kinetica

With 6,000 active OVO merchants, (and with more added every month), Lippo Group was eager to take advantage of Kinetica’s geospatial analysis capabilities. By doing so, their sales and acquisition teams were able to quickly assess the performance of merchants in a particular area. Armed with that data, they were able to dramatically improve their merchant acquisition rate. Lippo Group applied geospatial analysis to two different use cases. The first one is internal-facing and used geo-filtering by boundaries. Business users at Lippo Group were able to draw a custom area on the map, and perform further analysis based on the selected merchants within the area.

The second use case was customer-facing, and used Kinetica to locate nearby merchants within a certain radius. Typically, an OVO customer will log in, and the app will display nearby merchants. Lippo Group can then provide real-time marketing content to the customer, such as deals in the area within a certain radius.

With this support from Kinetica and NVIDIA, Lippo Group Digital can leverage any existing digital channel within the organization to deliver personalized messages and offers to their customers and embed machine learning for product recommendations. The same API can be reused multiple times across channels. OVO will be able to correlate customer, transaction, and location information, and geospatial analytics will deliver actionable insights for Lippo Group business units to better understand business performance and help them outperform competitors. The big data API and AI platform enables all OVO touchpoint channels to introduce new and personalized experiences to customers in real time.

To learn more about how Lippo Group integrates the Kinetica insight engine into their custom dashboard, and to see a demo of their OVO merchant dashboard, please watch our webinar, How Lippo Group Leverages Geospatial Data to Understand their Customers Better. You may also be interested in Lippo Group’s presentation at Strata: Delivering a Big Data Analytics API with 360-Degree Customer Profile Data from Multiple Industry Data Sources.