Case Study

Omnichannel Marketing for personalised Customer Experiences

Every year, the portfolio of the omnichannel retailer HSE24 includes more than 20,000 articles from the fashion, jewelry, cosmetics, wellness, household and home & living segments. Given this product variety, the company has been using SAP Marketing Recommendation since 2018 in order to offer its customers the best possible customer journey through all channels and at all touchpoints.

A good Start: An Omnichannel Strategy

Digitisation is stimulating home shopping. This is also underscored by the result of a market overview commissioned by the Electronic Retailing Association (ERA Europe) in 2017, according to which, industry sales are expected to rise by more than a third to 6.4 billion euros by 2022. As early as 2016, around 4.8 billion euros were generated in the industry overall, of which around 1.9 billion euros were generated in Germany alone.

The HSE24 Group is also active in this market, generating sales of 821 million euros in 2017. Launched in 1995, initially via TV, the company has now developed into an omnichannel retailer that is present on all relevant channels – on TV, online, mobile and on social media. The consistent and seamless networking of the platforms makes the HSE24 Group a driver of innovation for modern home shopping. The cross-media presentation of theme and brand worlds with a lifestyle character is the unique selling proposition. In line with a consistent omnichannel strategy, customers can decide for themselves when and how they want to shop.

The personalised Shopping Experience

However, customer demands continue to rise and, in addition to a variety of shopping channels, the individual shopping experience is becoming increasingly important: offers and product presentations in the web shop as well as content in the newsletter must be tailored to the needs of the customer.

To this end, HSE24 recruited the support of Syskoplan Reply. The objective: To create an optimally designed customer journey – both in the webshop and in the app – via a central omnichannel marketing platform with improved customer support at all touchpoints.

Syskoplan Reply has been supporting its long-standing customer HSE24 in the provision and further development of IT systems for more than two decades. Since 2013, this has also included SAP Customer Experience. In a current project, the existing Recommendation Engine was to be changed to SAP Marketing.

Recommendation based on Analytics

SAP Marketing Recommendation makes it possible to use personalised product recommendations based on analyses of click behavior and past purchases – and a combination of both – at suitable touchpoints in the webshop and in the app: from the product detail page, via the “Add to shopping cart” feature and the shopping cart view, to the order confirmation, and the “Sold-out” page, which displays alternatives to sold-out articles.

Not only the IT department, whose system complexity has been reduced by using standardised SAP solutions, benefits from the implementation. Positive results were achieved on the customer side, too. This allows customer needs to be identified better through data analytics, buying behaviour to be anticipated, and buying decisions to be supported, which greatly enhances the shopping experience. In HSE24’s view, the implementation of the project is a complete success.

Product quality is extremely high and the performance of SAP Marketing therefore fully meets our expectations

Andreas Glufke
HSE24

The technical solution

To provide customers with a dynamic online shopping experience, the company’s primary concern was to maintain a highly available and high-performance omnichannel solution that serves the current channels but is also prepared for the future.

Another important point for HSE24: it should be possible for employees to operate the Recommendation Engine independently in SAP Marketing. New models or changing individual parameters should be independently possible in the system in order to react flexibly to changes in the offer. And that was achieved in the opinion of Rainer Koska, Reco and Search Planner at HSE24: “The user interface is very clearly arranged and intuitive to use. The individual steps, models and algorithms can be configured without any problems”, he concluded after the introduction.

The following systems were introduced:

  • Implementation of SAP Marketing Recommendation

  • Integration of different applications (CRM for sales interactions, Webshop for click interactions and product data, DWH for product data)

  • Development of a caching mechanism for improved response time and recommendation availability

  • Customer-specific adjustment of the recommendation algorithms