KIT: Leading the way in Global Retail
KIT was selected by a global luxury fashion retailer as its brand new Clienteling and Assisted Selling solution in late 2016. The organisation’s goals, met by KIT, included support for its Store Associates in driving sales, hitting their individual KPIs and nurturing customer loyalty, based on preferences, behaviours and purchases. KIT’s success at this organisation, and other high-profile retailers across the world, is predicated on placing the Store Associate at the heart of the customer journey, and offers the very best customer experience, consistent with one of the world’s leading fashion houses.
Key to the success was the fast and smooth implementation of a highly extensible product that is easy to navigate, contains all required and relevant information and is enjoyable to use. KIT removes barriers between Store Associates and customers and has proven to be hugely popular with both. Store Associates particularly appreciate the speed, usability and the fact that customer data is surfaced seamlessly, allowing them to accompany customers throughout the in-store sales experience without ever needing to leave their side.
This was achieved in part by placing the full Clienteling and Assisted Selling functionality within one single app, allowing Store Associates full visibility of the entire product range and customer interactions, enabling them to provide the customer with a tailored endless-aisle shopping experience. Importantly KIT enables Store Associates to run KIT on iOS devices renowned for unparalleled user experience.
KIT functionality includes barcode scanning, which enables the Store Associate to browse the product line and check stock availability in-store and online. Store Associates can order products online on behalf of the customer if products are unavailable in-store. This means Store Associates receive the required commission via without having to log in to a separate system – a key component in monitoring KPIs. Store Associates can easily switch between specified languages and automatic configuration based on store location. This functionality, as with all following roll-outs, was successfully piloted in two stores in each major region across the world before a full release to all stores.
‘Knowing your customer’ is an important fundamental of modern retail and KIT puts this invaluable knowledge directly into the hands of the Store Associate. Thanks to KIT they are now able to search for a customer, view a customer profile, customer transaction history, notes associated with them, assigned tasks (for example the Store Associate receives a reminder within the app to call and wish a particular customer a happy birthday), marketing consent and contact details. As an added security benefit a geo-lock was included, limiting the accessibility of the app to those inside the physical store only. Store Associates can now see their entire client base all from within the app, saving considerable amounts of time when searching for a particular client but also serving as a reminder to service their entire client list when appropriate.
KIT also surfaces automatically generated tasks sending them directly to Store Associates. Once a customer has completed a purchase, whether in-store or online, Store Associates receive reminders to contact the individual to ensure they are satisfied with their experience and purchase. A perfect example of how KIT harmonises the online and in-store sales journeys.
During the initial major roll-out, KIT’s implementation team was on-site across the world, including in Mainland China and Hong Kong, Japan and Korea to ensure smooth adoption and observe how KIT was being utilised by Store Associates across regions and cultures. This enabled them to feed into later development and the product road map.
Results & Successes
KIT is now used by Store Associates across all 450+ stores worldwide, translated into 11 languages – English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and simplified and traditional Chinese.
The product has led directly to substantial increases in Store Associate task adherence, improved data capture and analysis, increased sales and cross-sales. In Europe, over 90% of details of new in-store customers are recorded using the app, which eliminates customer capture at the till reducing unnecessary queues and delays. The effect on customer experience has been hugely positive and combined with the harmonisation of the in-store and online sales journeys, the organisation maintains and continues to develop its reputation as one of the world’s most respected brands. The ability to send centralised tasks straight to Store Associates has a direct, substantial impact on revenue and the barcode scanning functionality saves thousands of man hours allowing Store Associates to focus on driving sales and enhancing the customer experience.
Future Releases
Exemplifying the extensibility of KIT, additional functionality will go live in the first half of 2019. The Newsfeed will provide seamless integration with the organisation’s content management system, enabling it to push content to Store Associates, provide updates on company activities, news and links to specific product pages and information from its website. The Survey Mechanism will provide them with the ability to orchestrate global, rapid questioning and surveying of Store Associates. The Sales Associate KPI, another first for the organisation, will allow Store Associates to monitor and engage with their own KPIs from within the app.
“Working with such an internationally respected and iconic brand was thrilling for us. The organisation is leading the way in leveraging the very best technology to support their retail strategy and we couldn’t be more thrilled to be collaborating with them. It’s an honour to have a product we are so proud of creating being used by such an amazing brand in every store in multiple languages across the world.”
Dan McNamara, SAP+ Lead Partner
The implementation of KIT was part of the retail organisation’s wider global digital transformation and platform replacement strategy. The project included simultaneous implementations of SAP Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and SAP Marketing – with a migration of 18 million customer records to the new customer experience platform.
