The Business
Many seek out meaningful gifts in the form of jewelry and in Germany, CHRIST fills that demand for everyone—from a couple in a young budding romance looking for a small trinket to those who are seeking out luxurious diamond accessories.
As the leading jeweler in Germany, CHRIST is no stranger to the evolution of the jewelry industry. What has not evolved is CHRIST’s longstanding commitment to delivering top-of-the-line customer experience every step of the way. Leaning into its strong heritage and market presence, CHRIST focused on ensuring that digital transformation was top priority as they explored how to deliver the best omnichannel customer experience.
The Challenge
In 2013, CHRIST undertook a complete organizational transformation to become an omnichannel-first company by bringing in crucial functions in-house to nurture knowledge transfer and in-house expertise. They needed a way to have more control over every channel they touched, whether it was point of sale, email, web and loyalty. Initially a very small team of 10, CHRIST grew their e-commerce team to over 100 members over the last decade and has dedicated smaller teams within each to each functional area. Their aim was to maximize their customer experience solutions and connect siloed data in order to turn holiday gift givers into life-long customers.
“When you have more data, you can learn more about customers. Our challenge was that we have lot of systems regarding CRM and silos with data collection. We wanted to be more efficient and have a better communication with the customer to increase the repurchase rate. SAP Emarsys was the best product that we saw. It was fitting our demands to have all the data in one tool and to use this tool with an omnichannel marketing perspective”
The Solution
With SAP Emarsys and their partnership with KPS, CHRIST has been able to reimagine customer engagement. Emarsys helps them consolidate sales data, behavioral data, and historical data into a single platform, making it easier to better understand their shoppers to drive repeat purchases–increasing their CRM revenue by 30-40% compared to last year. In turn, CHRIST was also able to automate more personalized marketing campaigns, like birthday promotions and loyalty rewards to give shoppers ideas that incentivise them to shop throughout the year. They have also operationalized their marketing efforts to maximize their time and creativity.
Consolidating data into a single platform
As the teams embraced a consolidated data transformation, they adopted technologies, like SAP Customer Experience (CX) solutions, that empower CHRIST to put their customers at the center of everything they do. With such a large database and vast amount of product offerings, CHRIST needed a tool that could scale with them as they transform their digital footprint. With SAP Emarsys, they helped the team better collect customer insights to build their customer data history–something they lacked with their previous provider making it difficult to create personalized product recommendations. Before SAP Emarsys, their customer data was managed across 3 different platforms. Now, they can manage their Web, Email and Mobile Wallet communications all in one tool.
This consolidated data also helps them surface insights to better understand where the highest potential is across channels and campaigns. They also plan to leverage the SAP AI Toolkit in the future to make sure they help deliver the best value for their customers at scale.
SAP Commerce Cloud plays a pivotal role in their operations, particularly in order management and ship-from-store capabilities. These features enable efficient inventory management and order fulfilment from multiple locations, ensuring timely deliveries. The platform’s composable approach also allows CHRIST to integrate best-of-breed tools, providing them with the flexibility needed to deliver exceptional customer experiences. More than 200 stores are connected to the webshops and are actively shipping out orders directly to the customers.
Preparing for high stakes holiday sales
The holiday season brings new shoppers both online and in-store and CHRIST needed a way to ensure these gift givers continue to shop throughout the year. With SAP Emarsys pre-built tactics, they were able to create a campaign in under an hour and be inspired to create new campaigns that drive impact. One of which focused on driving customer loyalty. They were able to add a new channel to their mix with Mobile Wallet, helping them connect experiences in-store and meet their on-the-go shoppers where they are. Shoppers can now download their loyalty pass from their email and then scan the loyalty pass in their local store. This new channel was added in just 2 weeks!
CHRIST always strives to create memorable moments for their customers so ensuring that they can easily search, discover, shop and receive their purchases in a timely manner is critical. Cyber Week is a priority event for CHRIST to achieve their revenue targets, despite economic challenges. This means ensuring that their marketing campaigns are personalized and targeted, their sites have 100% uptime and are reliable, their content feeds to their sites seamlessly, orders are fulfilled in a timely fashion and accurately, and any customer service requests are solved efficiently. With SAP CX solutions, CHRIST was able to achieve 99.9% in availability with a traffic increase by 150%.
"Setting up campaigns in SAP Emarsys is pretty easy. The Tactics feature is pretty helpful because it gives you inspiration for new campaigns. Now that we have been working with Emarsys, we can report a much better deliverability for our email campaigns. We can see an incredible uplift in open rates by 10-15% and that results in higher CRM revenue which has increased by 30-40% compared to last year."
Mobilizing customer loyalty at scale
The CRM team at CHRIST needed a way to enhance meaningful touchpoints while in store. For this, they looked to Mobile Wallet and created two experiences to start. These experiences are tracked via Reporting and Analytics with SAP Emarsys to understand the number of cards generated and downloaded onto a shopper’s mobile device. With Mobile Wallet, the team can also use pass notifications to quickly and easily notify card holders of a current or ongoing sale, coupon expiration or offer additional discounts within a selected time period.
Digital Customer Card
This Mobile Wallet card primarily identifies the shopper while they are in store, connecting their in-store purchases or browsing with their online profile. The card includes first name, last name and CHRIST CLUB loyalty ID.
Loyalty Voucher Card
This Mobile Wallet card identifies the shopper while they are in store as well, plus, offers them a reward based on their loyalty status. With a voucher ID and pin number, the shopper can easily redeem their collected cash back reward at any of their 200 stores across Germany and Austria. They are given a real-time balance update of their available cash to spend. Plus, on the back of the Mobile Wallet card, the shopper is pointed to their online CHRIST CLUB account where they can login, shop or locate their closest store location.
""[With Mobile Wallet] I can send notifications to a lot of customers, it’s essentially a new channel we can use. It's very beneficial, especially for our loyalty program"
Creating faster campaign creation
With pre-built tactics, the CHRIST team was able to set up automated campaigns quicker and with less IT reliance. Campaigns include integrated sales, behavior and historical data to ensure they are hyper-personalized and relevant for each customer.
Birthday Campaign
This automation included both web and email communications and was triggered at the time of the shopper’s birthday. The customer gets a birthday email with a coupon code on their birthday. Then, if they go to the online shop 2 days after and didn’t buy something, they will receive a web channel pop up that reminds them of their birthday coupon.
Loyalty Campaign
As part of a 3 tier program, their loyalty campaign offers credits that can be used both online and in-store. With SAP Emarsys, they’ve built 15 campaigns for this loyalty program including custom made automations including a tier upgrade incentive.
Building a strategic partnership
With a small team, CHRIST needed to look to customer experience experts to advice on the best way to build a foundation built on customer data. For this they looked to the team at KPS who successfully accompanies companies on their digitisation journey, from strategy to customer interaction to core operations.
"To be honest it was really fun to do this project together with the team at SAP and KPS because they took the time to understand our individual business case–what the right goals could be, how could we achieve them and then work together to achieve the goals. It was a very good project, in time and budget, and good collaboration."
The Impact
CHRIST is by no means finish with their digital transformation journey. The future is shiny for CHRIST and to remain that way, they have a clear idea of their future roadmap to stay digital focused. AI, like many other retailers, are top of mind to support generating product data and personalized recommendations. CHRIST also plans to leverage AI to improve customer engagement by better understanding the data they have collected. From there, they will be able to enhance their segmentation strategy and drive more precision marketing efforts.
CHRIST’s digital transformation journey underscores the criticality of adopting modern technology, automation tools, and feature-rich platforms to enhance customer engagement across all channels, ultimately driving profitable growth. As CHRIST continues to explore new innovations, ways of harnessing data, and more, their commitment to providing personalized and memorable experiences remains steadfast.
“Our long lasting relationship with KPS is a key factor in our success.”