Summary
Our client, one of the fastest-growing companies in its industry, with annual revenue of $5.3 billion and 13 well-known and specialty brands, is renowned worldwide as a supplier of high-quality household and personal care products.
The Challenge
Overcoming barriers to improve consumer analytics to drive direct-to-consumer (D2C) business
Our client offers multiple distinct brands of consumer goods, including many secured through mergers and acquisitions. Its challenge was supporting its D2C environment and sustaining D2C marketing activities with disparate and siloed information. The company also lacked standardized processes for D2C, B2B and service to support the D2C environment.
Furthermore, the company’s ERP and financial reporting system was unable to support D2C data, resulting in financial reconciliation and revenue recognition issues.
Because the client used multiple third-party logistics solutions for fulfillment across brands, it also experienced multi-faceted supply chain issues. It became imperative to achieve high delivery throughput. The company also needed to support the operational efficiency of its central supply chain data platform and engender better cross-vendor collaboration. The process was hindered by:
- A near absence of data-collecting tools and mechanisms
- Limited data computing power in existing support systems
- Lack of transformation tools to convert data into business intelligence (BI) insights
The Objective
Centralize business-critical data and establish an omnichannel customer experience enabled by data modeling
The client sought a technological solution that would standardize business processes to support a viable D2C environment and improve marketing. They also wanted to increase revenue and customer satisfaction by leveraging insights derived from D2C data with the help of an advanced data model.
HCLTech stepped up to the challenge by providing data-led, actionable recommendations for ongoing architectural and technological changes. The expectation was that we would generate business-critical BI data centrally and own the operations and automation initiatives.
The Solution
Implement Salesforce Cloud to scale web commerce and order management
Our approach was to enable standardization and simplification in this complex environment with the Salesforce ecosystem. When building the product supply core data lake, we considered our client’s data engineering and science needs. Our first step was to collaborate with the client’s manufacturing ecosystem DevOps managers, solution architects and other stakeholders to understand their requirements.
We designed the solution to handle increasing volumes of consumer data and standardize the environment in Salesforce Cloud. The solution’s components include:
- Supercharging D2C ecommerce through Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which supports all store fronts
- Enhancing B2B commerce by empowering retailers to order products and access service information on orders via Salesforce
- Tracking multiple payments against orders and providing trusted information to the financial reporting system via Salesforce
- Providing inventory data to the client for third-party logistical operations with the Salesforce Commerce Cloud order management system
- Empowering our client to self-service shipping, billing, returns and product warranty information through Salesforce Service Cloud
- Optimally managing data at scale and unearthing actionable BI insights through analytical dashboards and operational reports
- Tracking overall customer satisfaction via Salesforce Service Cloud
- Enhancing marketing activity via customer master records supported by the Salesforce Cloud
The Impact
Operations efficiencies, cost improvements and an omnichannel commerce experience
HCLTech leveraged industry best practices and standards to execute a seamless Salesforce Cloud implementation.
But the most important measures of success are the benefits the company reaped from the implementation, namely:
- By making consumer data and BI insights visible to the client’s leadership team for analysis, the solution drove efficiencies, reduced operational costs and created a superior D2C omnichannel user experience through automation, scalability and agile practices
- Standardization on the Salesforce ecosystem streamlined customer purchasing and provided a consistent data model that the company uses to cross-sell and upsell
- The company’s new self-service support model has optimized customer service center operations and improved customer satisfaction
- Automated revenue tracking and recognition have streamlined reporting and minimized manual work
In other words, the project supercharged this industry leader’s success, priming it for a future of further growth.
