From Operational Efficiency to Strategic Innovation: The Impact of Amazon QuickSight on Wake

This is a guest post by Mario Nascimento and Rafael Rodrigues from Wake.

In the ever-evolving digital age, where ecommerce is the engine of modern retail, finding solutions that drive growth and excellence is crucial, and this is where Wake stands out. Working with digital solutions throughout the consumer journey, Wake offers innovative and personalized solutions by combining advanced behavioral analysis through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to personalize the shopping experience, integrating omnichannel solutions for a frictionless consumer journey. Our strategy includes developing dynamic content based on deep consumer insights and enhancing engagement to meet the most complex demands of its customers because we want to boost business of all sizes. To do this we had to reinvent the market and the way companies hire solutions.

We offer a flexible retail ecommerce platform, characterized by its fluid and customizable integration. It features a strong connection to marketplaces and an omnichannel management offering, which solves operational challenges for physical and online retail. We prioritize the consumer experience, employing a customer data platform (CDP) and behavioral AI through various communication channels to improve marketing strategies. In addition, we highlight our commitment to influencer marketing, empowering influencers and brands with a complete and integrated approach, always focused on the consumer experience, which is the heart of success in digital retail.

Our experience with business intelligence (BI) solutions

Data analysis is part of Wake’s DNA. We analyze thousands of pieces of consumer information every day. However, we faced major challenges with our previous BI solution, which limited our evolution, directly impacting our business and hindering our ability to react to market changes and make decisions quickly.

Challenges included complexity in access management due to the lack of a single sign-on system, restrictions on personalization and data filtering that made detailed analysis and generation of specific insights difficult, and slow performance on dashboards, affecting our productivity and decision-making.

We sought proposals from market vendors, following Gartner’s Analytics and BI Magic Quadrant, where, after a 4-month proof of concept, we chose to fully migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to meet our data and analytics needs. We selected Amazon QuickSight due to to its outstanding balance between cost and benefits, ease of dashboard creation and migration, and high security. It stands out in a competitive market because of its advanced functionalities, such as machine learning (ML)–powered forecasting, user-friendliness, and superior graphical quality of its dashboards. The absence of proprietary language for development and its capability to integrate with various data sources without compromising the volume of data handled reinforce its status as a robust and versatile solution. This makes it ideal for organizations looking to optimize their investments in BI tools without sacrificing performance and security.

Because we’d used our legacy BI tool since our founding, this migration wasn’t a straightforward lift and shift. We identified which dashboards and data we needed to migrate to Amazon QuickSight. During the process, we discovered that a significant part of what was in our legacy BI tool was not used. However, because our data was already in Amazon Redshift, it was simple to re-create the dashboards with QuickSight.

Greater use and features

After implementing QuickSight, we saw an impressive improvement in the speed of delivery of dashboards and reports, with a 30x increase in average loading speed, reducing wait time to just 2.5 seconds.

QuickSight also provided a significant reduction in the time needed to develop new dashboards. With its drag-and-drop interface, pre-built templates, automatic data discovery features, and other intuitive tools and resources, we were able to reduce development time by up to 70%, allowing our teams to focus more on advanced analysis and less on operational processes.

These achievements reflect the positive impact of QuickSight on our operations, enabling us to make more informed, agile, and cost-effective decisions in an increasingly competitive environment. This is most evident through the notable 1200% increase in the number of users accessing the dashboard over approximately 4 months. This dramatic increase demonstrates our commitment to our data-driven culture.

Improving our business by incorporating QuickSight

We initially made QuickSight data available internally to our Customer Success team, providing clear, objective visibility and valuable insights into personalized service opportunities. The positive results were immediate. The dashboards provided the Customer Success team with real-time visibility over multichannel marketing campaigns, payments, debt and churn tendencies. This allowed the team to act quickly to identify and minimize issues, improving financial indicators and increasing customer retention.

The following image shows the behavioral and one-off email channels performance analysis dashboard. It offers views into overall visibility and by account, client, period, segment, and tier.

The following image shows the behavioral events capture control dashboard in near real-time. It provides quick visibility into the health of behavioral data capture by customers.

We then extended the use of the dashboards to our customers. We used Amazon QuickSight Embedded to deliver personalized reports with standardized access to data, the ability to create new dashboards, and the possibility of exporting data with minimal effort. We are seeing an excellent rate of adoption by our clients of these customized QuickSight Embedded reports. The reports have facilitated access, providing near real-time insights directly in the application panel, which enables more assertive and data-driven decisions.

The following image shows a QuickSight Embedded dashboard that provides insight into the performance of the Lightbox plugin.

The following image shows a QuickSight Embedded dashboard that offers a comprehensive view of a user’s message consumption history.

The following image shows a QuickSight Embedded dashboard that provides visibility into the performance of on-site plugins.

It does not stop there

For the next stages, we are eager to test other QuickSight features to deliver innovation and differentiate our products through predictive analysis. Our roadmap includes the usage of Amazon SageMaker Canvas in conjunction with QuickSight, evolutions on our Embedded products, and the exploration of Amazon Q. We aim to deliver flexibility and agility to our customers through generative BI.

Wake innovative, off-the-shelf, and data-driven solutions are available for retailers of all sizes. Get in contact with Wake to learn more.

If you’re interested in using tools and resources to create your own robust and innovative BI solution, QuickSight easily integrates with your data environment and allows for a fast ramp-up from connection to the delivery of data, insights, and reports to your customers. Contact AWS today to get started.

About the Authors

Mario Nascimento, Executive Manager of Technology Operations at Wake, is a passionate technology and data enthusiast. With more than 26 years of experience in the field, he has witnessed and closely followed the evolution of the web. During his career, he has stood out by working in strategic teams and contributing to the development of innovative software solutions in various sectors, such as electronic commerce, marketing and sales, and logistics.

Rafael Rodrigues, Technology Manager at Wake, leads multidisciplinary teams with an unwavering focus on innovation, process improvements, and technological solutions. Motivated by the desire to overcome challenges, he strives to exceed the expectations of customers and end users, using technology as the main tool for transformation and success.