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Google Cloud has ramped up capabilities for its grocery and mass merchandising customers to Black Friday and Cyber Monday levels.
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Google Cloud’s Black Friday/Cyber Monday program helps customers with capacity planning and management to prevent outages or customer experience disruptions.
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Retail is one of six industries that Google Cloud has been targeting with industry-specific solutions.
Google Cloud has ramped up capabilities for its grocery and mass merchandising customers to
Black Friday/Cyber Monday levels as they face unparalleled demand for groceries and other essentials amid the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Customers including Target are seeing an “unprecedented” period of demand that rivals the biggest holiday shopping days of the year, according to Carrie Tharp, Google Cloud’s vice president of retail and consumer.
We've had to turn on the Black Friday/Cyber Monday protocol to support those traffic demands and surges so that they can handle whether people are hoarding and pulling forward their buying or just kind of changing their consumption behavior.
- Tharp, chief digital and marketing officer
In a “normal” retail year, Google Cloud’s special Black Friday/Cyber Monday program helps customers with capacity planning and management to prevent outages or customer experience disruptions when the traditional start of the busy holiday shopping season begins on Thanksgiving or the day after. Google Cloud engineers typically work shoulder to shoulder with retail customers’ IT teams to ensure their e-commerce systems have the scalability and reliability they need in that peak season, according to Tharp.
Learn More:
https://cloud.report/news/how-google-cloud-is-helping-during-covid-19/12509
Retail is one of six industries that Google Cloud has been targeting with industry-specific solutions since Thomas Kurian assumed CEO responsibilities last year. Its retail customers are tapping its vertical retail solutions focused on accelerating omni-channel sales and using data to help drive business and operational improvements, according to Tharp.
Google Cloud had to support Canadian supermarket chain Loblaws with extra capacity because the number of its consumers using its express grocery pickup tool has rapidly accelerated.
“We've taken the best of our tools that we have and are using all of our account resources, our customer engineers, our professional services, to do a lot of these rapid development, rapid migrations as needed,” Tharp said. “Things like our Contact Center AI have become very important, where we're able to do rapid stand-ups of virtual agents to help some of these partners with pretty basic (customer) questions that are just overwhelming their call centers and their stores about what are your hours, do you have certain products in supply, trying to use the buy online, pick up at curbside (options).”
Learn more:
https://cloud.report/news/business-and-covid-19-public-cloud-to-the-rescue/12531