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Building a Single Source of Truth
Oddbox
Enabling a client to use data to better understand customers and sustain growth while battling food waste in the UK.
Oddbox is a sustainable produce box subscription service that operates in the UK. The client, now B-Corp certified, battles food waste by rescuing surplus fruit and vegetables directly from farms and delivering them to customers.
Oddbox needed a single source of truth to give them the level of confidence required to take action. They needed to understand customer churning and design a way to increase retention. In order to grow, their business stakeholders had to be able to identify profitable customers, where they came from and how to drive them further in the sales funnel.
What we did
The Challenge
Oddbox had unconnected data silos, which would pose significant challenges for reporting and analysis. They would export data manually into Google Data Studio to create reports, which would make data drill down impossible and would not allow the client’s team to create their own reports.
The client did not have an internal data team and needed help identifying the right data stack in terms of ELT, data warehouse, analytics and additional tools. Additionally, practitioners would need to model logistics data into Shopify or use a ReCharge schema to report during the transition and avoid any gaps in reporting.
A single source of truth in the modern data stack
We set out to connect Oddbox’s data sources to add value beyond silos. Our ultimate aim was to enable the wider business to self-serve and answer their own questions, preventing analytics bottlenecks across departments and functions.
Our engineers started out by setting up Snowflake that included work on databases, users, schemas, roles, permissions, stages, billing monitoring and billing policies. We then set up Fivetran connectors to extract data into Snowflake from over 15 sources related to accounting, marketing, customer relations management, payment processing and more.
Data modelling
dbt was our data modelling and testing tool of choice. We designed raw, staging and data quality layers, created an integration warehouse layer to integrate some of the sources, and added a reporting & analytics warehouse layer to serve standard reporting and ad-hoc analytics.
Data analytics
Oddbox wanted to empower teams across the business with a hybrid solution of pre-built dashboards, scheduled reports and self-serve capabilities. They accepted our recommendation to use Looker for the analytics part of the project. Our team used LookML to make sure relevant analytics tables were exposed to Looker in an explorable way.
The dashboards we built included reports on the number of new subscriptions, enabling client stakeholders to drill down into the details of a particular subscription, explore subscriptions by geography and access a detailed churn report, to name a few.
We also implemented an innovative keyword search solution that allowed Oddbox to quickly detect patterns in customer interactions.
Knowledge transfer
We put special emphasis on ensuring that clients can use all of the solutions we have created in an optimal manner. Organising a series of practical sessions on Looker, we made sure the Oddbox team were equipped with the skills they needed to fully utilise the platform’s functionalities.
The technology we useD
advanced segmentation and customer analysis
We designed and built a single source of truth for Oddbox based on the modern data stack. The data models and automated data transformation processes we implemented allowed for advanced analytics that directly supports business operations and contributes to data-driven decision making.
As segmentation was now done in the warehouse and powered by direct automation, Oddbox’s marketing team were ready to utilise advanced segmentation capabilities. In terms on sales and business development, we integrated all of the client’s data in a manner that allows for customer order analysis but it also supports order forecasting based on historical data
The automated reporting we set up empowered the client’s team to gain actionable insights into causes of churn. Because of the near-realtime reporting on Zendesk tickets, Oddbox could also quickly identify and respond to issues to get them resolved and increase customer satisfaction.
Let’s walk the walk together
We are a generation of engineers and technologists who are passionate about transforming organisations with digital-age solutions and seeing them thrive on the cloud.
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We have helped over 50 organisations to deliver projects at different scales with over £100m in ROI.
We have helped over 50 organisations to deliver projects at different scales with over £100m in ROI.
