Harrods

Creating the Golden Record

Synonymous with customer experience, Harrods has become a hallmark of luxury retail.

But Harrods is no ordinary retailer. Its flagship 93,000 square metre, seven-floor department store in London’s Knightsbridge, signature green bags, beautiful interiors and world-renowned food halls attracts a varied audience of shoppers, including high net worth customers, celebrities and tourists from all over the globe. In addition to the store, Harrods offers luxury fashion, accessories, food, homeware and gifts online.

With over 330 departments and dozens of concierge-style services, it serves a challenging demographic looking for everything from haircuts to handbags.

For a unique multi-faceted retailer like Harrods, loyalty is an integral part of its wider CRM strategy.

Introduced in 2008 to replace a store card product, Harrods ‘Rewards’ loyalty programme allows members to earn points and awards exclusive access to an array of benefits, across four membership levels (Green 1, Green 2, Gold and Black’ that are determined by annual spend. Although well positioned with an existing CRM solution, more and more systems were being added across its varied services, resulting in siloed customer data sets that didn’t connect, e.g. different records were stored in different systems, but not linked to each other. Each department already offered its customers a high-level of service and personalisation; however, it was only available in-store or for high-value customers.

The specific challenges this landscape posed included:

• A lack of depth in the data captured, with no customer interactions stored other than sales orders and transactions.
• A hinderance to scalable activities or the ability to adapt quickly due to limitations of the previous platforms.
• No consolidation of customer data, leading to a challenge when trying to understand what benefits and services may appeal to the customer, making targeted customer communication with accurate, relevant content impossible.
• No unified approach to communications or promotional activities to enhance sales, increase engagement and retention.

The Replacement of the legacy IT landscape

Over a period of 18-months, the partners navigated a complex transformation journey which included:

• Collecting customer data from all the different systems: breaking down data silos, merging and harmonising data.
• Replacing 17 legacy systems with a new platform with over 200 integrations to internal and external systems.
• Migrating and unifying master data, enriching it with data about which services the customers used and which products they bought.
• Building in a GDPR-compliance (similar to DSGVO), so a customer can have all their data deleted in one step and ensure that the data is not shared.
• Segmenting data sets with the help of scoring mechanisms, e.g. RFM segmentation, engagement score or churn prediction, ensuring the customer segments can be formed very granularly.

About 200 internal and external integrations were added to the platform, including the CRM system (SAP Cloud for Customer), the marketing automation tool (SAP Marketing Cloud), the customer data management (SAP Customer Data Cloud), the loyalty software (Annex Cloud Loyalty) and the data analysis/data visualisation (SAP Analytics Cloud with SAP Business Warehouse). Special applications were also needed for more specific use cases, such as telephone integration, chat integration (Sinch Contact Center Pro), link shortening (Sinch Campaigns) or a knowledge base (MindTouch Knowledge Management).

Every application has been integrated into Harrods’ IT environment and systems (SAP ECC, SAP CAR, SAP BW, Farfetch). Every available customer touchpoint has been connected and interacts with the platform, from the Harrods app to the currency exchange machine. Processes and teams are also now standardised and use one single system regardless of the department they are visiting. This reduces complexity, saves IT costs and standardises the user interface.

Harrods can now view The Golden Record

This single view of the customer helps Harrods at different levels: in making management decisions, in the business improvement team to analyse and evaluate customer behaviour, in marketing to create targeted and personalised communications and supporting customers in the best possible way.

High-value customers were personally greeted in the shop simply because employees know them. Now, such a premium service also benefits many more customers, as the view of customers can be viewed completely and quickly digitally. This makes it possible to focus on developing more customer groups into high-value customers.

The loyalty programme now underpins a scalable marketing communication for dynamic customer segments across different communication channels, with more sophisticated predictive models being developed to anticipate future customer behaviour and market to them accordingly.