Confluent helps shape the shopping experience for millions of AO customers

AO is one of the UK’s leading electrical retailers, operating predominantly online for the last 20 years and selling over 9,000 electrical products to millions of customers across the UK and Germany. A business that not only prides itself on putting customers first, AO is just as dedicated to creating an amazing place for their 4,000 employees to not only work but thrive.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a dramatic shift in consumer shopping habits, which led to a sharp increase in growth at AO. John Roberts, AO Founder and Chief Executive Officer, underscored the scale of the change when he explained that “the pandemic accelerated a shift in customer behavior towards online shopping – we saw ten years’ change in consumer behaviour in just ten weeks.”

Helping to enable the rapid changes needed to support this surge in growth is a real-time event streaming platform based on Confluent and Apache Kafka®. This platform enables the AO Customer Personalization team to deliver hyper-personalized online experiences by combining historical customer data with clickstream data and other real-time digital signals from across the business. Just as importantly, it is enabling AO development teams to accelerate the rollout of new business capabilities.