Kelkoo looks to hosted service to provide better customer insight

Kelkoo seeks new ways to improve customer service

Not surprisingly for a company that helps consumers snap up the best offers on a variety of products, from high-definition TVs to credit cards, data analysis is second nature to online price comparison site Kelkoo.

Lyndon Hearn, business intelligence director at Kelkoo, is aware that in an increasingly crowded market understanding customer behaviour will help the firm to outpace competitors and deliver desirable new services.

With this in mind, Kelkoo has recently implemented a data warehouse to bring together data from a disparate assortment of legacy applications.

“Due to our rapid growth we had a variety of independent legacy data collection systems that we needed to consolidate, because the systems weren’t as connected as we’d like, and they were slow,” said Hearn.

Analysing that data will allow Kelkoo to understand how customers are searching for products, and the criteria they are prioritising when purchasing. This new insight should allow Kelkoo to deliver a better service to its customers.

Despite the importance of data analysis, Kelkoo opted to outsource the operation of its data warehouse to service provider Kognitio.

This has enabled Kelkoo to concentrate on using the information to provide competitive advantage, without the overhead of building and populating the 1.5TB data warehouse, said Hearn.

The advantage of using an on-demand data warehouse is that Kelkoo can get all the number-crunching capabilities without the overhead of building and running its own system, added Hearns.

The Kognitio system is based on its WX2 analytical database, which can be interrogated using simple SQL queries. The analysis is performed at Kognitio’s datacentre and results served up to Kelkoo’s business analysts as plain text, negating the need to transfer large data files over the internet.

Kelkoo is now exploring the possibility of extending the system to incorporate other sets of data, with the aim of improving internal business management, said Hearn.