[ad_1]
It’s easy to say that customer experience is your number 1, but delivering a truly seamless journey is often horribly complicated on the back end. So, London-based luxury retailer Harrods uses SAP technology to ease that back-load and deliver a seamless customer experience across all its channels, including a growing ecommerce site, personal shopping in China and more.
But Harrods’ most important channel is still its flagship store.
“When we talk about the importance of luxury and experience, the store is central to what we do,” Erik Rasmussen, head of SAP and Data Analytics at Harrods, told SAP on the NRF 2023 showfloor. “Having that single flagship store is still very important to Harrods’ DNA and our long-term future.”
Harrods flagship store occupies 1 million square feet (about 93,000 square meters) of retail space in Knightsbridge, a London neighborhood known for its grand Victorian and Georgian houses, fine dining and, of course, high-end shopping. This single, full-line store offers food, fashion, furniture, homeware and technology – and had sales of £2.4bn last year.
“So, a small footprint but a big business,” Rasmussen said, noting that the flagship store alone carries 4,000 products out of 400,000. And incredible things [are] It happens every day.”
To keep surprises happening, Harrods and SAP invested in a single customer view project, an analytics initiative to help Harrods better understand how its customers interact with the brand. When Harrods can accurately predict what consumers want, delighted customers say “Wow!” It can provide unforgettable experiences that make them say.
How “Wow!”
“Harrods is a unique model … many other retailers will have a small selection of products in store and an endless aisle online,” Rasmussen said. “At Harrods, the most complete shopping experience is still coming into the store because of the diversity…[and] “The different experiences you have.”
Indeed, Harrods rewards shoppers with expert associates and truly amazing products at its brick-and-mortar flagship store. For example, in the Furniture section, you can see examples of each unit and then select your specific model from many variables such as size, headboard style, and trim configuration.
“You can quickly get into something like 10,000 different permutations with a single product,” Rasmussen said during a talk at SAP’s NRF booth. “When you think about it being spread across the entire product spectrum — spread across all the products that we carry, you suddenly start to find yourself in a very challenging data management landscape.”
To overcome that challenge, Harrods gathers all the necessary information from suppliers and others into its backend, Rasmussen said. Harrods’ digital technology team then built a web app that allows shoppers to take furniture from start to finish – from browsing to home delivery.
“A lot of the heavy lifting we have to do on the back end — it’s not easy to do this job,” Rasmussen said. But from a customer experience point of view, it will eventually be seamless.
Investing in customers – and a single view of the customer
Rasmussen said it was important for Harrods to become familiar with the nearly 2.5 million shoppers enrolled in the loyalty scheme. Of the 400,000 or so unique customers who shop in-store each year, the top 0.1%, roughly 400 people, account for about 20% of Harrods’ sales.
The 2021 SAP Customer Activity Repository and SAP BW/4HANA implementation laid the foundation for many of Harrods’ analytics. And, as a high-value – as opposed to high-volume – business, Harrods’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and data warehouse can analyze each individual transaction.
“This kind of investment — real insights, real analytics, real visibility — has really empowered our teams,” Rasmussen said. Knowing that data — and letting it feed things like a single view of the customer platform or our data science initiatives or complements — is the fuel for the things we can do to drive our business.
According to Rasmussen, such drives include reactivation campaigns, such as the one that hit a shopper who was offered free pasta by Harrods with a £50 purchase. The customer makes a qualifying purchase, receives the gift offer and immediately returns to the dealer’s floor to spend another £30,000.
If we can reactivate a total of 2.5 million customers [customers]the opportunities for our growth are going to be huge,” Rasmussen said. “It’s something we’re already looking at with payroll, and we’re excited to see what we can develop in the future.”
The future is still an experience.
Predictive analytics will be a big focus for Harrods, especially identifying new consumers who may be similar to their high-net-worth customers, Rasmussen said. With SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Customer Data Cloud and SAP Service Cloud, Harrods can help it find – and serve – its next big spenders, with SAP customer activity storage and analytics through SAP BW/4HANA with transaction data.
How do we take a customer that looks like they’re spending £2,000 and realize they’re actually a customer that needs to spend £200,000? Rasmussen said in an SAP video. “Find the right personal service in our personal marketing department, lobby service or statistician to ensure we can scale quickly.”
And, again, this seamless customer experience is made possible by a lot of work on the back end. But it’s worth it, Rasmussen said.
“The two things I’ve taken away from everything we’ve done at Harrods are the same, customer experience comes first,” Rasmussen said. “Secondly, I think we’ve really leveraged our strong partnerships with our technology partners, SAP being one of them. We believe that we can invest with them, innovate with them, and… together we travel to provide the absolute best experience for the customer.
[ad_2]
Source link
