The world’s leading luxury department store, Harrods, has completed of an ambitious 18-month project, led by KPS, to elevate customer experiences by streamlining their journeys both online and offline.
Among the benefits are improved customer loyalty via a unified approach to communications and promotional activities, and the ability to enhance sales via increased customer engagement and retention.
Over the past 18 months, with the help of UK and European specialist teams from KPS, the replacement of the legacy IT landscape has been rolled out – transitioning to a customer-centric and unified strategy.
Following a rigorous assessment and evaluation process, Harrods chose to implement an SAP CX solution, partnering with award-winning SAP experts, KPS, to manage the implementation.
In 2021, the partners set to work overhauling the Harrods platforms, with the overall aim to renew its customer loyalty platform, marketing platform, service and customer data management, reforming it in a scalable software-as-a-service (SaaS) architecture.
Over a period of 18-months, the partners navigated a complex transformation journey which included:
- Collecting customer data from all the different systems: breaking down data silos, merging and harmonising data.
- Replacing 17 legacy systems with a new platform with over 200 integrations to internal and external systems.
- Migrating and unifying master data, enriching it with data about which services the customers used and which products they bought.
- Building in a GDPR-compliance (similar to DSGVO), so a customer can have all their data deleted in one step and ensure that the data is not shared.
- Segmenting data sets with the help of scoring mechanisms, e.g. RFM segmentation, engagement score or churn prediction, ensuring the customer
About 200 internal and external integrations were added to the platform, including the CRM system (SAP Cloud for Customer), the marketing automation tool (SAP Marketing Cloud), the customer data management (SAP Customer Data Cloud), the loyalty software (Annex Cloud Loyalty) and the data analysis/data visualisation (SAP Analytics Cloud with SAP Business Warehouse).
Special applications were also needed for more specific use cases, such as telephone integration, chat integration (Sinch Contact Center Pro), link shortening (Sinch Campaigns) or a knowledge base (MindTouch Knowledge Management). Every application has been integrated into Harrods’ IT environment and systems (SAP ECC, SAP CAR, SAP BW, Farfetch). Every available customer touchpoint has been connected and interacts with the platform, from the Harrods app to the currency exchange machine.
Processes and teams are also now standardised and use one single system regardless of the department they are visiting. This reduces complexity, saves IT costs and standardises the user interface.
Harrods can now view The Golden Record – a holistic 360° customer profile through shared customer data and collection of customer interactions data from all contact points, both online and offline.
This single view of the customer helps Harrods at different levels: in making management decisions, in the business improvement team to analyse and evaluate customer behaviour, in marketing to create targeted and personalised communications and supporting customers in the best possible way.
High-value customers were personally greeted in the shop simply because employees know them. Now, such a premium service also benefits many more customers, as the view of customers can be viewed completely and quickly digitally. This makes it possible to focus on developing more customer groups into high-value customers.
The loyalty programme now underpins a scalable marketing communication for dynamic customer segments across different communication channels, with more sophisticated predictive models being developed to anticipate future customer behaviour and market to them accordingly.
To find out more about KPS and delivering digital solutions for the connected customer experience, visit www.kps.com/uk