In their quest to transition from a legacy IT architecture to a flexible, microservice-based platform, a large US beauty retailer collaborated with HCLTech. The partnership aimed to drive increased traffic to the retailer's physical stores, website and native applications while enhancing customer communications. HCLTech fortified the retailer's strategic and technical infrastructure through innovative technology and developed an advanced omnichannel solution. This integrated solution harmonized physical and digital consumer touchpoints, ultimately fostering increased customer satisfaction.
The Challenge
Overcoming legacy architecture to deliver effective CX
Our client's monolithic architecture lacked flexibility and scalability, operating in data centers with insufficient hardware to handle sudden traffic surges and ensure a faster time-to-market. This led to customers being funneled into a virtual "waiting room" when web pages reached capacity, causing frustration, difficulties with payment solutions and hindered merchandising of travel-sized products. With the holiday season approaching, these challenges threatened our client’s business growth. To mitigate this, they required an innovative cloud-based solution to enhance scalability, accelerate market growth and utilize customer data for better retention and personalization.
The Objective
Flexible solutions for innovating a new purchasing experience
The retailer sought an implementation partner with good technical and e-commerce expertise. Ideally, the ecosystem enabler would:
- Conduct gap analysis tests on the existing architecture and changing market requirements
- Create an implementation roadmap leading to more flexible solutions
- Enable consumers to seamlessly buy products and experiences when, where and how they want
- Offer recommendations on strategic third-party collaborations
- Install enterprise microservices and composable platforms to support innovation and auto-scaling on demand
To achieve these objectives, the partner would need to validate the client’s strategy and technical architecture. It would also have to execute a transformational end-to-end digital “makeover” that would integrate web and mobile strategy.
The Solution
Agility, flexibility, user-friendliness, speed and scalability
HCLTech facilitated progress by considering all stakeholders, from the retailer's corporate team to consumers, through the following methods:
- To understand consumer journeys, capabilities and principles, HCLTech conducted cross-functional workshops
- Collaboration with senior leadership, architects, business heads and operations/IT teams generated actionable insights during blueprinting
- The ATG-based eCommerce system migrated to Commerce tools on a MACH platform for agility and future readiness
- HCLTech revamped the company website, unifying the user experience for various pages
- Amplience Headless CMS improved website performance, integrated with a GraphQL layer for data descriptions
- Cloud-native architecture and automated CI/CD pipeline deployment ensured scalability and faster rollouts
The Impact
Improved business growth by transforming CX
To attract and retain more customers, HCLTech created a digital shopping experience that is high-performing, visually appealing, immersive and omnichannel (for iOS/Android mobiles, tablets, laptops and more.) This agile, experience-driven commerce system helped fuel growth for this US beauty industry giant and created the perfect foundation for future innovation. HCLTech is currently engaged in migrating the business control center, customer reporting and customer support center applications to the cloud. Enhancing the search engine, carts and checkout services are also in development.
