Member Article

Photobox Turbocharges its Customer-Centric Decision-Making Capabilities with Fivetran Data Integration

Fivetran halves the time required to make data available and ’analytics-ready’

Fivetran, the leading automated data integration provider, today announced it has accelerated time-to-insight and streamlined data management at Photobox, Europe’s largest personalised photo retailer. The deployment of new fully-managed data pipelines helps Photobox effortlessly create a 360-degree view of the customer and enhance personalisation capabilities to cement its competitive advantage in the market.

Photobox enables more than six million customers across its brands to create their own photo albums, prints and personalised gifts such as mugs, magnets and jigsaw puzzles, both online and via mobile. The demand for its personalisation service is particularly high around special events such as Mothers’ Day or Christmas, during which data volumes can jump ten-fold. This valuable customer data forms the basis of all decision-making at Photobox, and can be used to optimise customer journeys, inform product development and tailor promotions. However, the challenges of a sprawling data infrastructure, the burden on data engineers to manually build and maintain more than 200 bespoke data pipelines, and limited scalability have led the company to outsource and automate its data integration process.

The new, zero-maintenance data pipeline solution from Fivetran has halved the time traditionally required to make the data available and analysis-ready for Photobox. The automation has enabled its data teams to query customer data in a self-service way, spend time on improving and expanding the company’s enterprise data models, and make analytics insights – such as current trends, patterns and opportunities – more readily available to decision-makers in a centralised location.

“We wanted a solution that was easy to use, robust and intuitive, without requiring training or installation, and Fivetran immediately stood out for us from the competition – it felt ready-made for us,” said Stefano Solimito, Head of Data Engineering at Photobox. “We have now added more than 50 new data sources, including those for surveys, mobile advertising and workflow management, which are all helping us see customer journeys in a more holistic way. We look forward to leveraging Fivetran as we continue to expand our horizons.”

“Photobox has built a modern, customer-centric enterprise data model and technology stack, including the Snowflake cloud data warehouse and dbt transformations. The missing piece was a fast, reliable pipeline solution to carry data across parts of the business and create a single source of truth on which decisions can be based,” said Nathaniel Spohn, VP EMEA at Fivetran. “Photobox can now ingest data at a consistent level of ease, speed and efficiency, and see the most accurate insight on how customers are interacting with its platforms, even as more data sources are being added. It has set Photobox on a path to truly data-driven decision-making.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Amy Murray .