Reporting modernization

International Coffee Chain Modernizes Business Analytics With Amazon QuickSight for Deeper Marketing Insight

This leading international quick-service restaurant (QSR) and coffeehouse sought a better way to evaluate campaign performance and democratize data for more effective decision-making. This required a new approach to reporting that could handle high volumes of data, provide insightful data filters and visualizations, and offer self-service analytics.

The coffee chain’s team partnered with Wavicle’s data, analytics, and visualization experts to build a new reporting system using Amazon QuickSight as a scalable, high-performance reporting tool with an intuitive user interface and precise drill-down capabilities. With QuickSight, the company’s team has deeper insight into marketing campaign performance and customer loyalty, which allows them to make better investment decisions for new campaigns and initiatives.

Saying goodbye to slow, limited, and costly dashboards 

With a desire to better understand and evaluate digital marketing campaigns and loyalty, the coffee chain’s team needed accurate, timely performance analytics. They wanted to be able to evaluate the impact of specific campaigns on a granular level, evaluate digital sales and delivery, and segment buyers in new ways to better understand both their customers and the results of their marketing campaigns and investments.

Historically, their teams had used a leading business intelligence (BI) tool; however, their outdated dashboards lacked storytelling, filters, and the ability to drill down to specific locations, cohorts, menu items, and campaigns. The existing BI tool also struggled with the high volumes of data the team wanted to analyze – billions of rows of data that are constantly expanding – resulting in slow refresh times and a lack of detail. In addition, the costs of using it were significant, and the company saw an opportunity to cut costs while offering greater dashboard and report access by modernizing to a serverless BI system.

As an AWS Advanced Tier Service Partner with significant experience in restaurant analytics, Wavicle was the logical partner to support the coffee chain with this initiative. Wavicle’s experience, deep understanding of Amazon QuickSight, and BI converter tool enabled the company to quickly test and implement QuickSight as a modern BI solution. By building digital marketing and loyalty dashboards with QuickSight, the coffee chain aimed to gain campaign performance analytics at a lower cost and to democratize access to business analytics across their teams.

Gaining accessible, granular business insights with Amazon QuickSight 

Wavicle’s consultants first worked with the coffee chain’s business teams to conduct interviews, gather information about their reporting challenges, and build a technical understanding of their data. Once they compiled a full picture of the business requirements, the team started loading data and constructing insightful business dashboards.

On a rapid timeline, Wavicle’s backend and frontend engineers built a suite of QuickSight dashboards that provide the coffee chain’s teams with the data they need to make effective business decisions. Data engineers aggregated more than 13 billion rows of data, bringing the overall data volume down by 90% to improve dashboard performance and using Amazon S3 for data storage with Amazon Athena as a query engine. Due to the large volume of data, Wavicle’s team also optimized the environment with Athena timeout changes and SPICE memory extensions to accelerate data loads and refresh times.

The new dashboards demonstrate the strong visualizations and extensive granularity QuickSight has to offer. They provide new abilities to filter down by region, store, menu item, and more to provide greater insight to users. In addition, Wavicle’s consultants loaded raw data into and set up QuickSight’s Q feature to give the team better self-serve analytics access. 

Using Q, business users can ask questions of their data in plain English, interacting with data directly where it is being housed without the need for a developer to build individual dashboards. Q uses machine learning and natural language processing to turn those questions into queries and generate corresponding reports. Now, users on the company’s marketing team can ask questions like “What were the top five items by revenue at lunchtime in December of 2023?” and generate a report that answers their question. This expands the team’s ability to access the analytics they need when they are needed. It also reduces the burden on business analysts and engineers to create individual dashboards and reports for every campaign or hypothesis the marketing team explores.

Setting a new standard for rapid, accurate reporting and dashboards 

This QuickSight exploration provided the coffee chain’s team with a new outlook on the value a reporting tool can provide. 

Wavicle’s team built a suite of dashboards that demonstrated the full capacity for intuitive, insightful reporting through QuickSight. With more detailed reports that offer greater accuracy and timeliness, the coffee chain will be better able to gain actionable insight from their rapidly expanding internal data. In addition, the ability to use the Q feature for self-serve analytics reduces the burden on their internal data teams to construct dashboards manually for every new campaign or question. By providing comprehensive documentation and user guides, Wavicle also ensured that the team would be well equipped to navigate and utilize QuickSight effectively.

With deeper and more accessible reporting available at a much lower cost, the team is likely to expand reporting in QuickSight into new areas for market basket analysis, outlier or anomaly detection, and more in the future.