Harrods

Story Details

In addition to its world-renowned store in Knightsbridge, Harrods serves its customers through direct mail and Internet shopping. To maintain its sterling brand image while competing in a fiercely competitive market, the retailer must offer a uniformly excellent and consistent experience across all channels. At the same time, Harrods has to control its cost structure, or risk pricing itself out of the market.

The Holy Grail of multichannel retailers is to drive its marketing and sales efforts with a single customer view for all sales channels and products. But like its competitors, Harrods had evolved a number of disparate and incompatible systems. Unifying them would require a massive point-to-point integration project, which would be expensive and result in an inflexible and hard-to-maintain infrastructure. At the same time, the store couldn’t afford to start from scratch: It had made a behavior and preference information gathered from all channels. Closed loop analysis and continuous optimization features gives Harrods the ability to measure campaign return on investment and to test and refine marketing campaigns.

Knowing its customers better gives Harrods the ability to respond to their requirements quickly and accurately, improving customer service and increasing retention. In addition, it allows the retailer to anticipate which new products will be of interest to existing customers and thus increase sales.

Above all, an SOA-based infrastructure gives Harrods greater agility in developing new applications. The retailer will be able to create composite applications quickly, leveraging its existing software investment. The standards inherent in Java CAPS provide maximum flexibility while helping to reduce costs.

The single customer view deployment is just the first phase of Harrods’ complete realignment to a total SOA. In the future, Harrods expects to rapidly introduce more business intelligence systems that will garner increased customer insight as well as a deeper understanding of its products and services and help the retailer to promote best practice throughout. Harrods’ ultimate goal is to transform itself into an agile, flexible, efficient organization that provides unparalleled customer service and collaborates effectively with its supply chain while reducing the cost of its operations.