Rinascente Achieves a Near-Real-Time 360 Customer View With Snowflake

Rinascente is one of Italy’s most historic, high-end department store associations. For 150 years, it has offered customers a wide range of luxury brands, with thousands of products across fashion, cosmetics and homeware. No matter which of its nine branches customers visit, they’ll get a luxurious shopping experience, a wide selection of products and a high level of service from in-store staff.

The key to Rinascente’s success is understanding its customers. That’s why it’s maintained a strong focus on unified data over the years. But as it looked to expand its customer loyalty program and use near real-time data to better communicate with shoppers, Rinascente needed a new data platform to accelerate and deepen its insights.

After consulting with several independent technology integrators, Valentina Torti, Head of CRM, Integration & Data at Rinascente kept hearing the same thing: “We asked multiple partners about the best cloud data platform for our needs. And they all pointed us towards Snowflake.”

For years, Rinascente’s data team has been avoiding data silos and ensuring unified, democratized access to business insights. But as the business began to demand more data at a faster pace to keep up with the continuing digitization of the retail industry, Italy’s historic department store needed a new data platform that could accelerate time to insight — without creating silos or creating unnecessary headaches for users.

After considering Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud along with two other cloud-based data platforms, the team at Rinascente chose Snowflake for its ability to offer rapid insights, scalable performance and integration with other analytics tools.

Rinascente has now finished deploying its initial use case in Snowflake, a customer 360 platform that brings all customer data together to offer a complete view of how customers engage with Rinascente’s communications, loyalty program and service channels. Straight away, this use case has helped Rinascente deliver the comprehensive customer insights decision-makers need to deliver more personalized communications and experiences to customers.

Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud helps Rinascente provide detailed customer data to business users faster. But it also helps continue the retailer’s approach of consolidated, unified data management. 

Rinascente’s data team uses several analytics tools to get the best performance for specific queries, from ThoughtSpot for flexible self-serve customer insights, to MicroStrategy for reporting and analytics dashboards. And it uses platforms like Apache Kafka and Amazon S3 to collect and store raw data. But everything always comes back to Snowflake for further processing. 

“Snowflake is the core, but we’ve been able to link it to other systems that fit our particular analytics needs across different parts of Rinascente,” says Torti. “Anyone in the business can easily use APIs to connect to different systems they need to get specific insights.”

Crucially, this integrated data hub was deployed in just a few months. Rinascente’s data team engaged with Snowflake in February, and by June the customer 360 use case was live, including all integrations. “And this was far from a greenfield project,” explains Torti. “That time included building connections to other platforms and data and integrating with our existing processes.”

Since deploying the AI Data Cloud, Rinascente has achieved greater flexibility with its data architecture and transformed its reporting performance. The retailer’s heaviest customer data reports could take an hour or more to produce results on its previous system. Now, users can get results in just minutes, helping them make informed decisions faster.

But the data team at Rinascente knows there’s even more compute power to hand should future use cases demand it. “We’re currently getting great performance from Snowflake’s smallest data warehouse,” says Matteo Gabinini, Business Intelligence IT Manager at Rinascente. “But we can quickly decide on a bigger warehouse for more complex reporting sessions, without having to upgrade our internal infrastructure.”

Data continues to be readily available for anyone in Rinascente that needs it. And thanks to Snowflake’s Data Masking features, this doesn’t come at the cost of security and data privacy. The data team at Rinascente can have one data structure for the whole business, while ensuring that individual users can only see data that they’re authorized to view. “For us, this is really important for compliance,” adds Torti. “By using a system that includes these kinds of features out of the box, it simplifies our legal commitments to data privacy regulations, like GDPR.”

The Rinascente team already has extensive plans for where its platform will go next. 

As a subsidiary of Central Group, Rinascente may need to share data with other organizations within the conglomerate. With Snowflake’s secure collaboration features, the team knows it can share data directly in a highly scalable, secure way in the future.

Beyond this, the retailer is trialing using machine learning to deliver deeper customer trend analysis and experimenting with data applications coded directly in Python through Snowpark. Alongside these prototypes, Rinascente continues to rely on Snowflake for two large projects: bringing its stock-taking and in-store system data into the AI Data Cloud. “Once these projects are finished, all data for Rinascente will sit in Snowflake,” says Torti. “That means we can share the same tools across the whole business. That’s better for our bottom line and for our users.”