Leading luxury retailer Chalhoub Group has leveraged its strategic relationship with Salesforce, the global leader in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), to enhance customer e-commerce experiences in its digital transformation amid the COVID-19 coronavirus.
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Egypt’s beauty and personal care e-commerce market is valued at USD 1 billion, according to Bain & Company. In anticipation of its growth, and to meet customers’ shift to e-commerce amid the COVID-19 coronavirus, Chalhoub Group continued to accelerate its digital transformation to become a hybrid retailer, meet customer needs across channels and offer luxury experiences at the fingertips of consumers everywhere. Chalhoub Group has more than 700 retail stores across 9 countries.
In 2020, Chalhoub Group has already launched digital commerce experiences for 6 brands with Salesforce — Yves Saint Lauren beauty, Make Up For Ever, Faces, Swarovski, Tory Burch, Tanagra with more great launches in the pipeline.
Working with the channel partners Emakina and Changi Consulting, Chalhoub Group continued to accelerate its digital transformation by rolling-out Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud to drive e-commerce and CRM and personalize customer journeys across chat, email, social media, and WhatsApp.
“As the Middle East’s e-commerce market reaches record highs, digital transformation is a necessity for retailers to adapt even more rapidly to the post-COVID-19 era,” said Kristof Lukovich, Head of Digital for Beauty at Chalhoub Group. “At Chalhoub Group, our digital transformation with Salesforce has been enabling us to put the customers at the heart of what we do and listen to them. Chalhoub Group aims to delight customers through memorable personal experiences – understanding our customers is therefore of strategic importance.”
In response to customer needs during COVID-19 lock-down, Chalhoub Group worked with its brand teams to be available to and delight customers; for example Molton Brown created a luxury handwash and hand care set, making a daily routine a moment of luxury. Chalhoub Group also launched digital concierge services for some brands to virtually connect customers with makeup artists, and perfume and skincare experts from the comfort and safety of their homes.
Chalhoub Group has also doubled down on customer engagement via WhatsApp, on one of the region’s most popular social communication platforms, through a Salesforce integration leading to rapid responses to customer care needs in beauty for Yves Saint Lauren and Faces. “This channel has become one of the favorites with our Saudi customers, we simply listened to them made it happen. Our customers are at the center of everything we try to do,” said Kristof.
Chalhoub Group are also increasingly leveraging AI from Salesforce’s with Einstein, built-in intelligent solutions to personalize customer journeys, offer product recommendations, and are looking to implement Einstein Bots to ease the load on customer service agents by automating routine requests, which enables agents to handle more complex issues. They are also already leveraging MuleSoft to unlock and unify data throughout the customer journey, creating connected customer experiences in e-commerce, services, and retail stores with an API-led approach. MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform allows Chalhoub Group to increase the speed of delivery and time-to-market, while reducing complexity and maintenance, and dependencies on legacy integration tools.
“Recent events have accelerated the shift to e-commerce within the Middle East’s fast-paced retail sector,” said Thierry Nicault, Regional Vice-President, Middle East, Africa and Central Europe, Salesforce. “The Salesforce Customer 360 platform has enabled Chalhoub Group to respond quickly to the changing environment with a robust digital customer strategy that enables the group to respond to their customers across any timezone, location or device and deliver outstanding customer experiences.”