Originally founded almost 200 years ago, Canada’s #1 luxury retailer has grown into a premier high-end shopping destination. Offering the best in-store experiences is a top priority for the company. To best serve customers (and employees), the retailer needs information from multiple systems to make intelligent decisions about store staffing, to escalate customer concerns appropriately, and to offer competitive employee discounts. Without a team of dedicated integration developers, the retailer turned to Workato as a way of building out these integrations and automations quickly.
APPS
- Workday
- IBM Watson
- POS system
CHALLENGES
- Creating complex integrations quickly enough to keep pace with emerging needs
- Moving in-store survey results into a data warehouse and associating them with the correct employees
- Using survey data to identify top performing sales staff
- Applying employee discounts correctly based on their title
ROI WITH WORKATO
- Can create integrations independently, without using precious internal resources
- The waiting time for fully-functioning integrations is much shorter
- Can make informed staffing decisions based on customer survey data
- An improved employee experience
Like many organizations, the retailer relies on Workday as a payroll and HRIS system. Because the retailer is a subsidiary of a larger parent company, however, they share one Workday tenant with several other companies. This made it difficult to get integrations built quickly enough; there was a long waitlist of integrations that sibling companies needed, many of which are higher priority.
Instead of waiting for internal resources, the store turned to Dispatch Integration, a Canadian integration consulting firm, for help.
“We proposed Workato as an option because it would allow them to externalize the development of the solution,” says Rob Lamonica, Director of Professional Services at the consultancy.
With Workato, Lamonica says, building the necessary integrations would be much more straightforward than it would have been had they waited to use internal resources.
“All they needed was an access point into Workday to get the data out,” he explains. ”That would allow them to accomplish what they needed to accomplish via Workato. All of the integration recipes and administration can be handled inside of Workato, which is great for them because they didn’t have to maintain any infrastructure on their side. Workato’s in the cloud, Workday is in the cloud, and then they can take it from there. That was a real driver behind implementing Workato.”
Seamlessly Collecting Customer Feedback and Moving it Into Workday
Today, the retailer has a host of integrations running on Workato, but some of the most important are the integrations that power their customer feedback workflows.
The retailer’s stores offer a wide array of designer and upscale goods, as well as a one-of-a-kind shopping experience. In order to help refine this experience, the store asks customers to complete a survey after each visit. The survey allows each client to rate the service, expertise, and demeanor of the staff member who assisted them during their visit.
But this raw survey data was difficult for the company to digest. To gain actionable insights from the data, they needed to move the survey results into their HR platform Workday. Moving the data was necessary so that managers could easily see how well their employees were performing, identify trends and gaps in service, and keep accurate records for legal purposes.
Using Workato, the company connected Workday with its survey app. Survey results now flow into the Workday and are associated with the correct employee’s profile based on their employee identifier. Workato then leverages IBM Watson to parse the customer’s feedback. If there’s an especially poor review, Workato will automatically flag a manager via Slack or email so that the issue can be resolved as quickly as possible.
Refining the Customer Experience with Intelligent Data Analysis
With these automated customer feedback workflows, the company can fine-tune its signature in-store experience based on real customers’ tastes and preferences. These workflows have allowed the retailer to track customer experience trends and see a complete customer 360°.
This workflow also helps the retailer identify staff members who dedicate themselves to providing excellent experiences while streamlining the escalation process for service complaints. This means the company can make more intelligent decisions about which workers to keep on. Because the retailer frequently hires many seasonal workers during busy times, this data is especially useful in deciding which employees should be re-hired or transitioned to full-time positions.
Most importantly, Workato helps the retailer push this data into other programs, like data visualization tools, so they can identify trends in other departments—such as supply chain management. The result is a retail experience that is constantly being refined based on actual customer feedback!
Automated Employee Discounts
For the retailer, the employee experience matters just as much as the customer experience, so the company is also creating innovative integrations around common employee processes.
One of these integrations involves streamlining the employee discount program. Every staff member is entitled to a discount based on their role. When an employee makes a purchase, the cashier needs to know how much of a discount to apply. To make this happen, Dispatch is building an integration that will push employee information from Workday directly to the POS, so it’s immediately available during a purchase.
“We’re still working on several projects for them,” Lamonica says. “They have a long list of things they want to do with Workato—sometimes the list seems endless!”
