What do Hulu, Carnival Cruise Lines, Emirates Airlines, and Domino’s all have in common? The short answer is an insatiable need to dazzle and delight customers, each of whom has unique needs at unique moments in unique locations.
How Carnival Cruises Dazzles Customers
Let’s consider Carnival Cruises, which prides itself as the largest experience company in the world. Tens of thousands of cruisers sail on a fleet of more than 25 Carnival ships, which host travelers on the sea for 40-plus voyages a year. That’s a lot of passengers, each with dynamic needs and different expectations.
Armed with radio frequency identification- (RFID-) enabled medallions, passengers can move about the ship safely, receive personalized services such as meal and drink orders, and get access to excursions and experiences, all based on real-time data inputs. Most importantly, as new data insights are gathered, Carnival databases can process, identify, and action tailored options for passengers. Not only is this delivering a powerful customer experience, but Carnival also generates more revenue opportunities through additional services and options in the moment.
Carnival and the other customer experience brands mentioned above are all working with Couchbase, an Acceleration Economy Cloud Horizons provider. As a leading modern database provider for enterprise applications, Couchbase offers Capella a multi-model, NoSQL database-as-a-service. Capella promises database and applications developers the familiarity of SQL, the flexibility to gather real-time data across mobile, IoT, and offline sources, and the performance and scale to operationalize insights at the point of the customer.
“The requirement to turn data into analytics and insights that drive customer experiences and operational excellence is real,” shares Couchbase VP of Products and Solutions Jeff Morris. Marketing. “The good news is we are making real progress through what’s possible using cloud database technology and operational advancements.”
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Database-as-a-Service to Modernize Data Efficiency and Insights
With consumers and business pros researching, collaborating, and purchasing online and offline across devices and channels, buyer behavioral and customer data has become the lifeblood of business. Collecting and having this data means nothing if the right pros on your team can’t access it or turn it into insights used to better serve customers and businesses.
The traditional database approach challenges many companies to move at the speed of their customers with actionable intelligence. Couchbase’s Morris cites a few challenges that he sees when working with business and consumer-driven customers, including:
- Speed and Performance: Applications’ latency in traditional databases can crush database response time, providing an awful customer experience. It is also hard to detect where latency challenges exist (cue up the customer disconnects from a transaction and your brand).
- Flexibility and Familiarity: Developers are comfortable working with SQL, widely deployed in legacy databases, but these databases are not flexible. Couchbase is built in NOSQL (offering flexibility) but are compatible with current SQL databases (familiar for developers). This allows developers and their organizations to reduce their focus on fixing and manipulating data and instead focus on creating value.
- Inefficiency and Total Cost of Ownership: The rising costs of cloud infrastructure due to having to, for example, manage and operate multiple data store instances to support customer applications. The “every database gets an instance” is an inefficient practice increasing the cost and performance advantages business and tech leaders expect from the cloud.
Morris says Couchbase is attacking these challenges head-on with customers via Capella and the cloud database approach.
“We believe the key is to deliver the performance and flexibility of NoSQL databases (those that have in-memory processing, JSON document editability, full-text search, streaming, and analytics all upon the same pool of data) with the familiarity of relational databases that support a SQL language, ACID transactions, mobility, and scale.”
In addition to Carnival Cruise Lines, Couchbase is working with brands on data initiatives to drive efficiency and customer experience, including:
Domino’s is using real-time analytics built into the Capella database working with its Point-of-Sale (POS) system and other customer info to adapt to real-time events. For example, when a pro football game goes into overtime (overtime games are up 24% in 2022), this creates a customer need and gives Domino’s the opportunity to add food and beverage offerings and reach out to customers via their preferred channel.
Emirates Airlines is operationalizing millions of data points across applications that impact operations and the passenger experience. As gate information, weather, and all the flight variables change, pilots, ground crew, central operations, the baggage team, etc. are fed real-time information and updates no matter if the data is online or offline. The teams are now empowered with intelligence to take action and communicate with customers versus waiting for central operations to provide info and cause frustrating delays.
Turning Data Into Insights to Serve and Dazzle Customers
As organizations and as business leaders, we have collected so much data — 175 billion zettabytes (one zettabyte = 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits). High-performing organizations are not just collecting data; rather, the high-performers have shifted to focus on analyzing data for insights and translating data into actionable intelligence to better delight customers.
In today’s customer-centric, digital-first world, now is the time to evaluate modernizing your customer database strategy and bring legacy data models and infrastructures into more flexible, scalable environments.
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