HP helps BlaBlaCar improve customer experience
HP has announced that BlaBlaCar, an online community marketplace that connects drivers with empty seats to passengers looking for a ride, has increased customer loyalty and improved the effectiveness of its marketing campaigns by analyzing its big data with HP Vertica.
A successful and innovative worldwide start-up headquartered in Paris and with international teams in Madrid, Milan, Warsaw, Hamburg, London and Moscow, BlaBlaCar has created an entirely new people-powered transport network. With a state-of-the-art web and mobile platform, dedicated customer service and a fast-growing community of users, BlaBlaCar makes travel less costly, more social and more efficient for more than 10 million members in 12 countries.
"BlaBlaCar is such a hit among travelers in Europe that we transport more people a month than Eurostar, and we are in a rapid international growth phase," says Gaëlle Periat, Business Intelligence Manager, BlaBlaCar. "Business intelligence is at the heart of our decision making, and we take a data-driven approach to increasing the effectiveness of our marketing. Over two million people use BlaBlaCar every month, and HP Vertica helps us harness the power of that big data to optimize the performance of our CRM campaigns and develop programs to improve our customers' experience."
Running on a Cloudera Distributed Hadoop cluster, HP Vertica provides BlaBlaCar with a real-time big data analytics platform. Designed for read-intensive workloads, its fast ad hoc SQL query performance has increased the effectiveness of the company's marketing campaigns by enabling data manipulation and analysis with greater frequency, at a higher granularity, and from multiple touch-points.
In the future, HP Vertica will allow BlaBlaCar to further refine its targeted marketing activities by integrating social media and predicting customer behavior through pattern recognition.
Managed from a virtual machine running Debian 6, the Cloudera Distributed Hadoop cluster comprises two machines running HP Vertica, one machine running Tableau software for exploration and data visualization, and one running Data Science Studio by Dataiku. This structure allows BlaBlaCar to make its analyst teams autonomous, and ensures short iteration times.
"To help solve their marketing challenges, organizations like BlaBlaCar need to analyze massive volumes of big data -- structured, semi-structured and unstructured -- at unprecedented speed," said Colin Mahony, SVP & GM, Big Data Group, HP Software. "The HP Vertica Analytics Platform was consciously designed with speed, scalability, simplicity and openness at its core, and architected to handle analytical workloads 50 to 1,000 times faster than traditional data warehouse solutions."