Looker Community Event - Thursday, October 23rd at Google Amsterdam

📢 Mark your calendars — the 8th Looker Community Event is coming! 🚀

📅 Date: Thursday, October 23rd
⏰ Time: 4:00 PM - 6:30 PM
📍 Location: Google Amsterdam, 8th floor, Claude Debussylaan 34, Amsterdam

Get ready for the 8th Looker Community Event! For this event, we’re heading back to familiar ground — Google Amsterdam. With space for around 100 attendees, be sure to register early to secure your spot!

Talks:

• Nudging merchants for smoother refunds: Building a Recommendation Engine with BigQuery, Pub/Sub, and Looker by Sjoerd van der Schaar, Analytics Engineering Manager at Mollie
• From Decibels to Dashboards: How Looker Drives Decisions in the Festival Industry by Paul Ailes, Senior Data Analyst at Superstruct Entertainment & Jeroen Visser, CTO at i-Spark
• Managing Crystalloids from Spreadsheets to Looker on Google Cloud Platform by Richard Verhoeff, Managing Partner at Crystalloids

Agenda

• 15:45-16:15: Walk-in
• 16:15-16:45: Speaker 1
• 16:45-17:15: Speaker 2
• 17:15-17:30: Short Break
• 17:30-18:00: Speaker 3
• 18:00: Drinks & Social

More detailed information about the talks below:

Sjoerd van der Schaar, Mollie - Nudging merchants for smoother refunds: Building a Recommendation Engine with BigQuery, Pub/Sub, and Looker
Ever bought something online, returned it, and then waited ages for your money back? This delay isn't just frustrating for you; it's a critical business problem for the merchant, often caused by a low account balance that prevents them from processing refunds instantly.

At Mollie, we tackled this head-on. Using our rich payments data, we built a recommendation engine that calculates the optimal balance a merchant should hold to ensure they can always process refunds smoothly.

This system uses BigQuery to power the calculations, sends recommendation events to our application via Pub/Sub, and leverages Looker dashboards to track how merchants respond to our recommendations. This allows us to constantly monitor, learn, and iterate.

The results after one year proved its worth: a 46% increase in average merchant balances and a 60% decrease in delayed refunds. In this talk, Sjoerd will walk you through the journey of building this data product, from initial analysis to measuring impact.

About the Speaker
Sjoerd van der Schaar is Analytics Engineering Manager at Mollie where he leads a team of analytics engineers that focus on creating data products around the expanding set of financial services that Mollie offers. Sjoerd specialises in building data products around event streams with tooling such as dbt, Bigquery, Pub/Sub and Looker.

Richard Verhoeff, Crystalloids - Managing Crystalloids from Spreadsheets to Looker on Google Cloud Platform
Crystalloids is a Google Cloud Premier Partner, founded by Richard Verhoeff and led with dedication for over fourteen years. Our certified specialists help companies innovate and grow with customized data solutions, from applications to advanced data and analytics platforms.

What makes our story unique is that we live what we build. At Crystalloids, we integrate our business tools: Google Workspace, Hubspot, Jira, Exact Online, HR, and even NS Zakelijk on Google Cloud with Looker. This enables us to break down silos and gain near real-time insights into our key KPIs across marketing, sales, projects, products, people, and margins.

From a company of two people working with spreadsheets, we have transformed into a data-driven organization powered by Google Cloud and Looker—delivering responsible, scalable, and actionable insights for ourselves and our clients.

About the speaker
Richard Verhoeff founded Crystaloids and has led the organization day-to-day for fourteen years. Crystalloids is a team of certified specialists who help companies innovate and grow with data solutions. With a dedicated team, we create customized applications, data, and analysis platforms and products. Maintaining and further developing an excellent team is central to Crystalloids' mission to continue providing our clients with responsible solutions in an increasingly data-driven world.

Before 2012, Richard worked at Centerparcs for 12.5 years in various roles, such as e-commerce director, commercial director, and technology director. Richard started his career as a data scientist at Eurocard/Mastercard.

Richard's vision revolves around continuously retaining and developing an excellent team that provides clients with responsible and future-proof solutions in an increasingly data-driven world. In addition to his role as a leader and strategist, Richard is passionate about promoting diversity and inclusion within the tech industry. He is committed to cultivating a culture of collaboration, innovation, and growth within Crystalloids and the broader business and technology communities.

After years of practicing yoga and meditation based on the Zen Buddhist tradition, Richard now offers weekly meditation training sessions for beginners and more advanced students, including Crystalloids staff.

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PS: Are you a Looker user with insights to share? We'd love to have you as a guest speaker at future events. Drop us a line at mark@onesecondbefore.com and tell us how you'd like to contribute to our community of Looker enthusiasts!