MindTree enhances customer experience at New York & Company, helps them clock an impressive ROI Executive summary New York & Company, is a nation-wide specialty retailer of women's fashion and accessories. They work in a fast-paced environment and encourage their style to drive business at their stores. So, even a minor glitch like the non-visibility of the inventory in the POS terminals on the shop floor had to be addressed quickly to arrest the loss of sales it was causing. On the other hand, they also needed a specialist who could help them enhance their ecommerce application to boost their online presence and therefore sales, keeping in tune with their value of quickly responding to business trends. MindTree offers a two level solution: 1. ATG ecommerce to enhance their application 2.a verified solution to the non-visibility of inventory in the POS terminals. Needless to say, both targeted towards enhancing customer satisfaction, and therefore the New York & Company business.
Introduction New York & Company, Inc. is a nationwide specialty retailer of fashionable, attractively priced women's apparel, accessories and beauty products, serving customers for over 90 years. The company's proprietary branded New York & Company merchandise is sold exclusively through their national network of New York & Company retail stores. The Company operates over 580 retail stores in 44 states. In a bid to reach a larger customer base and boost their sales revenues, they wanted to establish a strong online presence. To achieve this, NY & Co adapted an ecommerce application serving B2C, hosted on an ATG framework. In parallel, NY & Co. also wanted to respond faster to business trends and embarked on a Save-the-Sale (STS)campaign, encouraging their styles to assist the customer and help them find and choose the product they need and fructify it into a sale. The campaign was to help boost sales across their chain of outlets and also work as a model that would help their styles engage better with the customer.
Business Challenge The ecommerce application was hosted on ATG framework, but ATG technology, being niche and expensive, required maintenance levels which far exceeded the allocated budget, proving to be a pain point. The STS campaign, on the other hand, reflected glitches such as non-visibility of stock inventory at the POS terminals across stores. As and when the store operator would log in to check for an item in the inventory, the system would take a very long time to respond or reflect an out-of-stock message. NY & Co approached MindTree to provide technology solutions for above challenges. MindTree was involved in providing testing services for the STS solution implemented by New York and Company and vendors. MindTree would first comprehensively test the Save-the-Sale application for glitches and provide verification to the feasible solution, and also offer consulting expertise from its Retail group to help New York and Company enhance and leverage its ecommerce application.
website: www.mindtree.com/retail | email: info@mindtree.com
Š 2010 MindTree
MindTree enhances customer experience at New York & Company, helps them clock an impressive ROI
Conclusion In a thrust to their online store initiative, New York and Company now boasts of an enhanced, superior ecommerce application that reduced their maintenance and the operational overheads cost. Beyond this, they now see the system as more usable and consumerfriendly and have measured a considerable traffic in their online store. By the end of six months, the Save-theSale campaign was completely tested and being used by store operators to check the store inventory and confidently address the customers' needs. This has helped them achieve an ROI of 400K USD annually through the sales 'saved' through the Save the Sale campaign per store every day!
The Solution The MindTree team studied the existing ecommerce application and implemented technology solutions that helped improve consumer experience and therefore helped NY & Co see an improvement in online traffic and sales. Some of the features that were incorporated in ecommerce application include: · A Loyalty Program that would bring back the customer · Product level and shipping level discounts · Business Intelligence module - An engine to analyze customer buying patterns and more · SoA model Automated ecommerce Promotions that would allow regular interaction with regular customers informing them of various offers and promotions · A product recommendation engine which would help the online buyer compare and choose MindTree chalked out a comprehensive testing approach for SaveThe-Sale theme that involved various test case scenarios and testing processes. MindTree conducted two cycles of interface testing and three cycles of system testing for stable application and ensured that the Save the Sale application was running smoothly once again, across all its 100 stores, by the end of six months.
Business Benefits ü Improved usability ü Increased online conversion ratio of sales ü Visibility of the item inventory at the warehouse from POS ü Reduction in maintenance costs ü Reduced operational overheads ü Achieve a ROI of $400K by converting 0.75 orders through Save-The-Sale per day per store ü Increase in conversion rates by 4 folds
ABOUT MINDTREE MindTree Ltd. is a global Information Technology Solutions company co-headquartered in the U.S. and India. MindTree partners with its clients to create a transparent, value-based relationship. We build innovative solutions in a wide range of technology domains that enable our customers to succeed in their business goals. MindTree's Retail group comprises 600+ consultants offering solutions spanning the entire spectrum of retail value chain. MindTree's framework based approach allows customers gain delivery excellence, faster time to market, and significant cost savings. We are focused on making the retail organization customer centric by bringing together our expertise in the areas of multi-channel commerce, analytics, mobility, social media, supplier collaboration, master data management & point of service. Having partnered with retail leaders across US, Europe, Middle East, Australia and Asia, MindTree further strengthens its retail expertise with dedicated Centers of Excellence (CoEs) for Oracle Retail, IBM WebSphere, Sterling Commerce, ATG, SharePoint, and SAP-IS-Retail. The CoEs allows customers leverage best practices, processes, and re-usable components across different client engagements. India | USA | United Kingdom | Germany | Sweden | Belgium | France | Switzerland | United Arab Emirates | Singapore | Australia | Japan | China
website: www.mindtree.com/retail | email: info@mindtree.com
© 2010 MindTree