Good Earth?a premier brand offering clothes and lifestyle goods with physical and online stores?was able to offset the disruption caused by COVID-19 with more than 100% increase in its digital business. As a design studio, the physical stores are critical to its omnichannel strategy to deliver an exclusive customer experience by enabling look and feel of artifacts, clothes and other household items.
However, as the pandemic caused a steep downfall in customer footfall, the business stepped up its online initiatives and focused on tighter integration of the omnichannel experience. This included an increase in customer engagement activities by making personal offers to individual clients and promoting voucher redemption across any platform; enabling to order online and pick up from stores; and place in-store orders for any item if it is available in the central inventory.
These initiatives coupled with closely observing the digital footprint of customers have enabled to deliver a customized experience and ramp up sales. Digital also enabled to design a highly effective loyalty program by continuously monitoring customer behavior and browsing habits to create a seamless experience across channels and make appropriate offers at the touch point.
One of the outcomes of observing customer journey was to enhance the mobile experience with progressive web app as 90% of traffic emanate from mobile and 82% checkouts take place from mobile. Speaking about the efforts to enhance the customer journey Dinesh Joshi, CIO, Good Earth says, ?Digital is deeply integrated into our business strategy as it enables to study the customer experience at every touchpoint with data capture. This provides insights to personalize subsequent engagements, provide better recommendations and enhance search capabilities.?
Delivering a good search experience is important as it drives around 10% revenue and the company wants to boost its search-driven revenue with machine learning to make search and recommendation engines more accurate.
Adversity Triggers Digital Transformation Journey
The 24-year-old company?with a turnover touching INR 200 crore and stores across Indian cities?embarked on the transformation journey several years ago when its website crashed during a sale. The company had promptly moved its web application to AWS and had resumed operations within hours.
Since then, the company has meticulously honed the Cloud journey adopting Cloud-native technologies including DevOps and containerization to continuously delight the customer with innovative features. As luck would have been, the company had completed migrating its Microsoft Navision ERP workload to AWS Cloud just before the Covid pandemic which has facilitated digital innovations in the wake of restrictions.
A major benefit of the Cloud journey has been in accessing low-cost storage. Working with craftsmen and artisans across the country, the design store generates tons of designs which are business-critical and require hot and cold storage facilities. AWS S3 and AWS Glacier offers differential storage capabilities enabling Good Earth to store 55-60TB of data at extremely low cost.
Digital has empowered the IT team to consistently deliver high performance with visibility into operations and enhanced security. More importantly, it empowers operations with the ability to loop the learnings from tracing the customer journey into business strategy. Says Joshi, ?The performance dashboard gives insights into every aspect of operations?speed of page load, time taken to return queries from database, knowing at which stage customer abandoned the purchase decision?equips us with insights to take preventive measures.?