Case Study | Technology
A leading construction supply company amplifies customer experience and revenue by unifying data, personalizing search and product recommendations.
A vision to build an ecommerce platform that offers a delightful CX
The client is a leading North American Distributor of Drywall, Steel Framing, Acoustic Ceilings, and Construction Supplies. With over 300+ locations across the United States and Canada, the client has significant geographic reach into most major building materials markets. They also specialize in the local supply of building materials such as drywall, steel studs, lath, plaster, stucco, acoustical ceilings, insulation, fiberglass reinforced panels (FRP), and exterior insulation finish systems (EIFS).
The client aspired to empower their customers with a platform that helps them drive exceptional customer experiences. A platform that would provide a seamless customer journey powered by relevant search and browsing experience, streamlined shopping cart and checkout process, while establishing a unified solution for post-purchase interactions, tailored specifically to their B2B clients.
Mainly, the client wanted its customers to find what they needed effortlessly, as if the platform could read their minds.
The business objective was to expand the platform’s user base by enabling advanced features on the Commerce Cloud including performance monitoring, delivery of personalized customer experiences through relevant product recommendations, and enhancement of site performance and security.
In pursuit of the goals identified, the client placed significant emphasis on evolving the customer experience by embracing the next generation of search capabilities. This transformation encompassed critical elements such as enhancing relevancy ranking, implementing faceted navigation, introducing dynamic type-ahead and auto-suggestion features, optimizing content search, and providing suggestions on the No Search Results page.
Brillio, on the back of its extensive experience with SAP Commerce Cloud, was well-positioned to support the client to transform the commerce platform – from innovating on the extensible, modular platform to managing scalable integrations from cart to checkout. All of this was built with a user-centric design that would result in unmatchable customer experience for their clients.
Streamlined operations by unifying over 200,000 orders for a single source of truth
Clean, structured, and accessible data is fundamental to driving connected customer experience. Considering this, Brillio helped stitch data across offline and online orders. Over 200,000 historical offline orders were seamlessly migrated to the new platform resulting in a single source of truth. The next step was to leverage this unified data to drive personalized experiences. One of the areas of concern was relevancy of search results and ‘No Result’ for search, resulting in disappointed visitors.
To fix the issue, Brillio cultivated a team of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) proficient in both SOLR and UNBXD as search engines, enhancing our capabilities with CCv2. The team recommended the migration of the search engine from SOLR to UNBXD. With UNBXD, an AI-driven eCommerce search platform, the site was equipped to understand shopper intent and connect them to the products they are most likely to buy. Brillio meticulously designed, planned, and executed the migration of the search engine thereby significantly optimizing search capabilities on the platform. To complete the ‘Wow ‘experience, SAP Commerce Cloud was integrated with Google Analytics delivering personalized customer experiences through precisely targeted product recommendations.
The client was focused on providing seamless commerce experience for their B2B clients as well. Towards this end, Brillio leveraged SAP B2B Commerce platform with its comprehensive set of features covering user management, payments, quotes, order management, fulfilment, and cross-platform data migration to provide delightful experience through the customer buying journey.
To efficiently address client’s enhancements and maintenance requirements, Brillio adopted an agile product development approach which ensuredthe platform’s adaptability and responsiveness to evolving user needs. End-to-end engineering processes were implemented that enabled parallel feature development using two different search engines. This approach facilitated parallel User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with full search capabilities and a seamless transition to UNBXD with minimal downtime.
Lastly, to maintain site performance and security, Brillio introduced Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices. This included synthetic monitoring, session replay capabilities, and the implementation of a consolidated dashboard for comprehensive application health checks.
6x revenue surge through expansion of customer base and revenue per visit
Following the transformative journey undertaken by Brillio to enhance and optimize various aspects of the client’s e-commerce platform, through a combination of strategic initiatives and technical innovations, the client achieved remarkable results, spanning customer acquisition, revenue growth, customer satisfaction, proactive issue identification, and technical proficiency.
The client achieved a 6x revenue growth by moving from legacy, one-size-fits-all search to personalized search and product recommendations that increased engagement, manifold.
A growing number of customers actively engaged with the product recommendation features, which was testimony to superior CX.
One of the key successes of the engagement was the increase in demand from mom-and-pop contractors to move to the client’s platform to establish or expand their presence on online.
Brillio successfully bolstered customer satisfaction by providing visibility into both online and offline orders thereby nurturing transparency and convenience. Through synthetic monitoring, the client was able to proactively identify potential pain points, boosting customer acceptance and confidence in the product. Additionally, concerted efforts in improving site performance and fortifying security measures enabled the client to scale with larger user base and guaranteed a smooth site experience for all users.