SoulCycle is a fitness empire built on one core product, 45-minute indoor cycling class that features high-intensity cardio, muscle-sculpting strength training, and rhythm-based choreography. What started as a single studio in New York and quickly expanded to more than 82 studios in the US and Canada, you can say that SoulCycle is more than just a workout, it’s a lifestyle. SoulCycle’s success relies on its member experience.
CHALLENGE
In order to improve the member experience and increase engagement, thus boosting retention and acquisition, SoulCycle needed to first understand what in the member experience works and what needs to be improved. For this they need quick and free access to data to perform speed-of-thought analysis.
The fitness chain interacts with its customers in the omni channel format–not just across technologies, but through offline touch points, whether it’s kiosk machines, check-ins, or apps. Each time manually extracted and built by hand by the manager of a particular data silo. Reporting was time-consuming, as each report relied on an analyst to manually extract data from each touch point.
SoulCycle’s first-generation reporting system contained a limited set of data and inadequate for insight to improve the member experience and fuel growth. Most of the data existed only in silos of Marketing, Product, Finance and HR. As the data was not available across the organization, analysts lacked a 360-degree view of the business.
SOLUTION
SoulCycle partnered with Caserta to solve their data analytics challenges. After Caserta performed an assessment, it was clear that in order to have the freedom of analysis, the data ecosystem would have to be re-engineered. Caserta designed and implemented a modern data architecture on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Data from siloed systems is extracted, transformed (as necessary) and loaded into a modeled data lake and into Big Query.
Caserta reskilled SoulCycle in order to enable them to continue to be self-sufficient and add new sources of revenue after the engagement ended.
OUTCOME
SoulCycle analysts are now able to look at data across multiple sources. With the new ability to generate reports quickly and get access to the data they didn’t have before, time to generate reports and total cost of ownership have been reduced. Since much data analytics processes now take minutes rather than days, analysts can spend more time analyzing the data, which helps SoulCycle make better decisions on either a future project or an ongoing project. The analytics platform quickly and easily provides actionable insight on how to get riders maximally engaged and consuming SoulCycle services.