Next generation B2B omnichannel experience
Case Study
Starting in Spring 2020, against the challenging backdrop of the pandemic, a cross border, hybrid KPS team worked against the clock to help Mirka redesign its B2B customer portal. With an archaic legacy online store slowing them down, Mirka wanted to create an omnichannel experience that would allow them to grow and interact with their customers at a deeper level.
Launching a brand-new cloud-based ‘Partner Portal’, employing the Spartacus headless storefront application, in just six months – KPS have delivered a new transactional platform with a wealth of content and features that are transforming Mirka’s customer experience.
Now Mirka’s team can build stronger relationships with their customers, and the business has the perfect digital steppingstone for future growth and agility.
As an international B2B company in the manufacturing industry, we knew that to continue growing our business we needed to focus on digitalisation and providing our distribution partners an outstanding online experience.
Background
Headquartered in Finland, Mirka is a world leader in surface finishing technology and offers a broad range of ground-breaking sanding solutions, power tools and polishing machines for the surface finishing and precision industry.
Mirka’s products are exported Globally and sold in over 100 countries through their distribution partners. However the business constantly growing at pace, Mirka knew that it had rested on a legacy catalogue online store for too long.
An excellent customer journey is what purchasers from the manufacturing industry want professionally, as they are used to an outstanding online shopping experience also in their private buying experiences. Mirka knew that and to continue growing, it needed a platform that could:
Scale seamlessly with the business’ growing global footprint.
Provide partners with rich content and guides to help them understand Mirka’s ranges and how to market products, marketing collateral, making sure they have knowledge/tools to sell the products successfully to end customers.
Provide insight, like seeing their growth in markets, reports on purchases and volumes.
Help build relationships, providing content about partnership benefits and personalisation.
solution
Using an industry-leading consultative approach, KPS took valuable time to understand Mirkas end vision, the touchpoints in their partner journey and the future it wanted to be working towards.
The process started with customer journey mapping, which presented all the customer touchpoints, and identified existing barriers to interaction and engagement. Once this was done, KPS had a roadmap for a CX transformation.
Mirka began working with the KPS team in Spring-2020 and set an ambitious go-live date of October that same year. Not only was that deadline tight, but the global pandemic also placed an unprecedented amount of pressure on cross-border team collaboration. All work had to be undertaken remotely – with the design phase meetings, and research conducted virtually.
The landscape of this project included Spartacus, while the headless commerce application was still relatively new to the market, CDC (Customer Data Cloud) and SMC (Sales Marketing Cloud). In addition, it uses Mirka's own ERP system for product data and EpiServer for content management. All in all, there were 36 different integration touchpoints in the first phase of the project alone!
In KPS we found the right transformation partner that helps us in our digital CX transformation and can provide us with best practices from the B2B and B2C Industries.
The project was a true partnership. Divante, the leader in e-commerce oriented progressive Web Apps, and the core contributor to Spartacus Storefront, took the reins on the UX and Front-End elements, KPS UK built and developed the SAP Commerce Cloud version 2 core platform and SAP Sales Marketing Cloud. At the same time, KPS Germany implemented SAP Customer Data Cloud.
All of this was built on Mirka's own customer ERP, but KPS had the expertise and experience Mirka needed on the team and meet any complexities with innovative solutions.
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