How Kroger Enhances Customer Experience with Omnichannel Optimization

Data is at the heart of innovation in retail. It also plays a critical role in driving transformative customer experiences. Unfortunately, the existing data layer powering key services forces unacceptable tradeoffs — whether in data consistency, scale, cost, or flexibility.

Leading retailers are rapidly adopting Yugabyte’s distributed multi-cloud SQL database, YugabyteDB. This database provides key data consistency. It also offers the resilience, security and seamless scalability needed for both existing and new cloud-native applications.

In this blog post, we’ll explore how Kroger is making the right digital transformation investments using a modern data layer to power a flexible growth engine for their business.

Satisfying Today’s Customers

Customer expectations of retailers are at an all time high. They also no longer just compare apparel stores to apparel stores and hardware stores to hardware stores. In addition, 90% of consumers use their smartphones while shopping in stores.

To satisfy these expectations, retailers need to focus on two critical groups: the customer and the frontline worker. Now more than ever, customers value their time and need an easy, seamless shopping experience. They want the simplicity of modern e-commerce, accurate product information, meaningful loyalty programs, and more. Frontline workers need to be efficient with their time so they can spend more time with customers and enhance their experience.

Meeting those demands starts with a modern data infrastructure. This infrastructure should support rapid innovation of new services with easy deployment across geographies and accurate, timely data. Here are three key ways that a modern data layer can improve your customer’s experience:

• Offer best-in-class experience: Accelerate your developers productivity so they can rapidly deploy new, innovative services
• Increase customer satisfaction: Customer approval can quickly disappear without accurate, consistent data to correctly represent product availability, shipping status,
   and more
• Deliver competitive pricing: Operating margins in retail are tight so streamline IT operational costs with simple, open source solutions to reduce fixed costs

Kroger’s Journey to the Cloud

Kroger is the largest supermarket by revenue in the United States — operating over 2,750 stores. It wanted to modernize its aging technology while addressing scalability, reliability, observability, and monitoring. The company shifted to a microservices-based architecture running in a hybrid cloud environment with a strong preference for open source solutions. However, a key component of this new architecture is YugabyteDB, a 100% open source, distributed SQL database built to accelerate cloud native workloads.

Kroger chose YugabyteDB for several reasons including:

• Distributed ACID transactions
• Scalability
• Multi-region active-active deployments for resilience
• Multi-API support
• Automatic data sharding.

Finally, YugabyteDB clusters were deployed in a multi-region configuration with synchronous replication, achieving single digit millisecond latency.

Conclusion

Some of the world’s largest retailers rely on YugabyteDB to power key systems—from enabling modern shopping carts across multi-clouds to consistently managing 100M+ products in a global catalog to delivering the scale and performance for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. These retailers have proven YugabyteDB’s unique capabilities can handle the most demanding needs of a retailer.

Learn More About Kroger’s Omnichannel Transformation

• How Kroger’s Data Architecture Powers Omnichannel Retail Experiences at Scale 
• Transforming the Omni-Channel Experience at Kroger

How a Modern Data Layer Powers Omnichannel Success

Master omnichannel success with YugabyteDB, and discover how top retailers optimize operations, diversify channels, and elevate customer experiences.

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