FirstHive Powers Customer Data 10x Faster with Snowflake

FirstHive is an AI-powered customer data platform. Our focus is really three verticals: we go to financial services, retail/CPG and travel/hospitality. All these three verticals end up dealing with lots of consumer data alongside a lot of unstructured, anonymous consumer interaction information. What FirstHive does is it comes in as the brain in the body, connects into all of these data sources, and enriches that data with a lot of the unstructured behavioral information that’s available. It then delivers an autonomous layer of decision-making to be able to orchestrate customer experiences across all these channels.

Prior to Snowflake, there were certain complex workloads and queries that in our traditional data stores may have taken a few hours to run at times. That is where we introduced Snowflake as part of our architecture, and we actually experienced a significant improvement in the overall scale of data that we were able to manage, as well as the overall throughput that we are able to deliver for the clients that we work with.

Three parameters were very, very important for us: performance, scalability and security. While evaluating Snowflake, we found that it meets our requirements well. Snowflake has helped us with a feature called auto-scaling, where it will spin up new clusters based on the workload and automatically de-scale, helping to reduce our engineering effort. The second thing we observed was that the core processes which used to take 12 to 14 hours, we are now able to achieve in less than 90 minutes — which is a 10x performance gain. The third thing is related to a specific feature called dynamic tables, wherein the complexity of managing and creating your own stored procedures to give the latest data to the customer is managed internally by Snowflake.

Snowflake forms a very integral part of our architecture here at FirstHive because it provides us with the extensive amount of scalability that we require to handle the data workloads our clients expect. This obviously helps our clients achieve significantly higher conversions and marketing ROI, thereby driving an overall higher customer experience for their own clients.

Customers using FirstHive have seen outcomes like a 40% improvement in ROAS (return on ad spend), an 18% reduction in cost per lead, and a 50% to 60% unlock of new data over and above what they had in their traditional CRM. We believe that partners like Snowflake have the technology and the platform to scale along with the pace of growth that we would expect, especially for these verticalized solutions and the rate of growth that our customers have come to expect from FirstHive. FirstHive is their superpower that allows them to go from a scattered, fragmented data ecosystem to a smart, usable, intelligent customer experience plane. As we enable this for enterprises, Snowflake really allows us to power all of this at scale.