A VIP experience for all customers.
Dixons Carphone stays a step ahead by bringing its high-touch, personalised in-store shopping experience online, using Adobe Experience Cloud.
500%
faster time to market for competitive campaigns
Objectives
Improve website agility so that merchandisers can quickly respond to market changes and customer needs
Put ownership of web content creation back in the hands of business teams, instead of developers
Deliver personal experiences to website customers to improve sales and brand loyalty
Results
500% faster time to market for competitive campaigns
10x fast changes for rich, optimised content
17% increase in conversion with targeted web offers
400 hours of development time saved in 6 months
“Adobe Experience Cloud is one of the most seamless digital experience platforms available. Adobe understands what users want to do and creates paths for information to flow between solutions.”
Harry Sohal
Product Owner, Adobe Experience Manager, Carphone Warehouse
Tradition of service
Dixons Carphone is one of the largest consumer electronics retailers in Europe for a reason. The company always puts the customer first, using a deep understanding of electronics and digital services to anticipate what products, services and knowledge customers need. Through its well-known brands such as Curries PC World and Carphone Warehouse, Dixons Carphone sells a wide range of electronic devices, from mobile devices and computers to kitchen appliances, cameras and televisions. The company even offers broadband and television services for homes and IT services for businesses, demonstrating its commitment to providing everything customers need to be connected and happy.
Dixons Carphone brands have a long history of success through its brick-and-mortar shop fronts, in part because customers know that they can try out the latest models and talk to knowledgeable sales staff before deciding on the product or service that meets their needs. But like many retailers, Dixons Carphone is embracing the shift toward digital commerce. People are increasingly shopping across channels, researching products online and then making the purchase with the help of a salesperson in shops or vice versa. For Dixons Carphone, it was vital that customers feel that they’re receiving the same expert advice and same great shopping experiences across every touchpoint.
“We’re not only competing against traditional brick-and-mortar shops, but also digital retailers,” says Harry Sohal, Product Owner, Adobe Experience Manager, for Carphone Warehouse. “Customers expect a VIP experience where we can blow their minds with compelling offers, in-depth product information and very personal engagement. We’re not just looking to make the sale once. We want to delight people at every moment and turn them into loyal, lifelong customers.”
To provide customers with the personalised service and up to date information that they expect, Dixons Carphone needed to transform its digital platform. The Carphone Warehouse website, for example, was static and relied heavily upon developers to write code. The company wanted a more agile platform that would put the power and control back in the hands of merchandisers who were closer to the products and the market.
Dixons Carphone chose to manage its Carphone Warehouse website using Adobe Experience Cloud. With Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Target, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, Dixons Carphone can quickly create and test content to provide customers with more useful and relevant experiences. Adobe Analytics, part of Adobe Analytics Cloud, provides real-time data that helps the company make intelligent decisions about how to present product information and reach customers through the website. While each solution is powerful on its own, Dixons Carphone particularly values the integration across the Adobe stack that allows it to share information and create more meaningful interactions with customers.
“Adobe Experience Cloud is one of the most seamless digital experience platforms available,” says Sohal. “Adobe understands what users want to do and creates paths for information to flow between solutions. The result is an innovative digital platform that allows us to create an exceptional end-to-end digital journey for our customers.”
“The merchandising team can make changes 10 times faster with Adobe Experience Manager. We’re also achieving 500% faster time to market for new campaigns. This agility allows us to react to market changes before our competition and establish ourselves as leaders in the retail market.”
Harry Sohal
Product Owner, Adobe Experience Manager, Carphone Warehouse
Fast web creation for agile marketing
Previously, the Carphone Warehouse website existed on a very traditional web platform. Creating web pages or adding dynamic features such as counters and scrolling images required programming and HTML knowledge, meaning that even small updates needed to be handled by developers. Carphone Warehouse was constantly updating prices and campaigns across its website, but these changes required significant planning and lead time, limiting the merchandising team’s ability to respond effectively to changing markets.
“We find that there’s often a window of opportunity to engage with the customer, particularly with major releases for new products,” says Sohal. “If we miss that window of opportunity, it’s very easy to lose market share. That’s why it’s so important that we can get campaigns out there as quickly as possible.”
By leveraging reusable components in Adobe Experience Manager Sites, the merchandising team can create an entirely new campaign, including a dynamic landing page, in 15 minutes or make a small update to copy in less than a minute. Developers and designers create customisable components, images and other assets that the merchandising team simply drags into a template. Usability is highly intuitive, with no need for extensive technical training.
For example, Dixons Carphone often releases time-limited offers for Black Friday and other major sales campaigns. Using Adobe Experience Manager, merchandisers can drag a counter component onto the product page that counts down to the end of the deal and gives customers a greater sense of urgency. Colours on each element can be customised to work with the specific brand or campaign theme. Merchandisers can even set logic options to automatically remove the counter and display text indicating that the deal has expired at the end of the campaign.
Creating flash sales once took a week working with developers on complex iterations, but using components such as the customisable counter, merchandisers can now create flash sales in less than a day.
“The merchandising team can make changes 10 times faster with Adobe Experience Manager,” says Sohal. “We’re also achieving 500% faster time to market for new campaigns. This agility allows us to react to market changes before our competition and establish ourselves as leaders in the retail market.”
Improving the web experience
Working with reusable components has other benefits for Dixons Carphone beyond agility. Developers saved a significant amount of development time—400 hours over 6 months—and reduced testing time by as much as 50%. With so much time saved, Dixons Carphone achieved payback on the component development cost within 6 months. Developers can focus less on day-to-day running of the website and more on creating features that will improve the overall web experience.
The Adobe Experience Manager workflow even helps to improve search engine optimisation (SEO). “On the old website, we had to limit the number of pages that we created because it took too much time to update information across pages,” says Sohal. “With Adobe Experience Manager, we have the freedom to create more pages that highlight information more prominently to consumers. The ability to connect consumers with vital information more effectively has improved our SEO rating, increased traffic to the website and increased conversions.”
“Adobe Sensei will be critical to us in taking the next step in personalisation across touchpoints. We can utilise artificial intelligence to keep in touch to more customers in a personal way by removing the manual task of creating audiences and matching them with top experiences.”
Harry Sohal
Product Owner, Adobe Experience Manager, Carphone Warehouse
Targeting consumers with customised offers
Dixons Carphone pushes the digital transformation even further by integrating Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target into the web environment. Adobe Analytics delivers real-time metrics that help Dixons Carphone better understand how customers are reacting to changes in the website. The company leverages that data with Adobe Target to optimise web experiences.
With Adobe Target, merchandisers can quickly test banners, page layout, call-to-action messaging and many other aspects of the website. Integration Adobe Experience Manager allows merchandisers to build test options quickly, while the data from Adobe Analytics helps merchandisers quickly identify failing options and adjust the experience accordingly.
More importantly, Dixons Carphone uses Adobe Target to target audiences with personalised content, offers and product information. For example, instead of showing the same mobile phone offer to all audiences, merchandisers may use Adobe Target to offer a deal for free headphones with the purchase of a mobile phone to a younger audience, while highlighting smart home technologies for older audiences. These targeted offers increased conversion up to 17% compared to non-targeted offers.
Dixons Carphone also achieved great success by integrating Adobe Analytics with the Search&Promote capability within Adobe Target. By feeding Adobe Analytics data into Search&Promote, Dixons Carphone can uncover trends, such as the best-selling product in the last 24 hours and highlight that result for customers. Customers tend to trust this type of crowd-sourced recommendation, leading to 7% higher conversions.
The next step for Dixons Carphone will involve creating more personalised experiences using Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology. “Adobe Sensei will be critical to us in taking the next step in personalisation across touchpoints,” says Sohal. “We can utilise artificial intelligence to keep in touch to more customers in a personal way by removing the manual task of creating audiences and matching them with top experiences.”
Dixons Carphone is currently looking to expand its use of Adobe Experience Cloud by implementing Adobe Campaign for the Carphone Warehouse team. The Adobe Customer Success team works closely with Dixons Carphone to identify the company’s needs and to maximise value from its investments.
“Adobe is a fantastic partner in our digital transformation,” says Sohal. “The Adobe Customer Success team not only enables us to get the most from solutions that work for us today, they push us to imagine where we want to be in the future and they give us the knowledge and technology that we need to reach our goals. Together with Adobe, we’re developing a robust digital platform that we can use to build highly competitive experiences for our customers across touchpoints.”
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