Revolutionizing the furniture retail
Rewarding customer loyalty through unique shopping experiences
POCO is a German furniture discounter headquartered in Bergkamen. Price-conscious customers will find an extensive range of furniture and kitchens, household goods and home textiles as well as electrical goods and gift articles in the yellow furniture stores. Products from well-known brand manufacturers are on offer as well as inexpensive private labels that are produced exclusively for POCO. More than 8,000 employees currently work in over 125 stores throughout Germany. The company is 100 percent owned by the XXXLutz Group. With a sales volume of 1.6 billion euros, POCO is one of the largest German suppliers in the furniture retail sector.
The Challenge
The outbreak of the COVID 19 pandemic led to a massive growth of online channels in furniture retailing. POCO was therefore forced to rethink and optimise its digital processes. The old ERP system did not contain clear customer profiles, many duplicates in varying data quality and did not allow for a holistic view of customers. As a result, measures to address and retain customers individually were not possible. To enable a holistic customer relationship, existing data silos had to be cleaned up and replaced with a well-planned data management strategy. Furthermore, there was no functional customer portal. Instead, the customer area of the online shop was used, which, however, did not allow the collection of detailed customer-related interests. The potentials of targeted, individual customer communication could not be used with the existing structure.
- Lack of golden record resulting in duplicates
- No optimal processes for increased demands on digital channels
- Varying quality of customer data
- No holistic view of customers possible due to information silos
- Lack of possibilities to pick up on customer interests and conduct targeted marketing
- Unused potential in customer communication
Before
- No central access to customer data/Singel Source of Truth
- Fragmented, outdated IT infrastructure
- Systems with many duplicates
- Varying data quality
- Many data silos
- Unused potential in customer communication and marketing
After
- Innovative system architecture on Salesforce platforms
- Automated customer communication targeted at individual interests
- Improved customer experience through new loyalty programme in the Poco app
- Increased customer loyalty
The Solution
With the establishment of a comprehensive data integration, data silos were dissolved and a new Master Data Management (MDM) was established to eliminate duplicates. The number of customer accounts was consolidated from 10 million to 4 million with unique customer profiles and golden records as a single source of truth. With AWS, endpoint-relevant data such as transactions and basic data on locations are cached to control the volume of visitors to the stores and avoid overloading the platform. The topic of customer loyalty in particular was intensively implemented at POCO: With the use of the Loyalty and Marketing Cloud from Salesforce, detailed profile data is created here. Both customer loyalty and customer depth could be increased by means of individualised and personalised communication options with customers. The loyalty programme is implemented via the POCO app and the personal self-service area in the company's new customer portal.
- Implementation of Salesforce Sales and Service Cloud as CRM platform
- Data integration from ERP system
- Use of Omikron's LeanMDM for the creation of a Golden Record
- AWS caching layer for intermediate storage of endpoint relevant data
- Implementation of Salesforce Loyalty and Marketing Cloud for personalised marketing
- Comprehensive loyalty programme in app and customer portal
The Results
Due to the growing demands on the customer side with regard to personalised offers and user experiences, POCO's demands on itself to meet these also increased. Especially on the digital channels, which have become much more relevant due to the pandemic conditions, the furniture store wanted to respond individually to its customers. POCO focuses strongly on personalised, individualised and automated communication through unique customer journeys. Through the loyalty app based on Salesforce intelligence, the customer experience was improved and strong growth in registrations from customers with high brand loyalty was recorded. This also resulted in greater use of the POCO Mastercard through appropriate incentives in the form of bonus points.
Quantitative results:
- Effective elimination of duplicates and cleansing of data records from over 10 million to 4 million
- Internal motivation POCO: 100,000 app users within the first year after go-live date