Retail Therapy: Optimising the Cotton On Group’s Online Ordering
Any retail organisation knows the rigours of trading in the months leading up to the Christmas season. Coupled with events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday becoming worldwide phenomena, companies must be able to keep up with demand.
With an online channel consisting of websites from every corner of the globe, Cotton On Group wanted to ensure their systems were optimised to keep up with the demand these peak periods generate.
Cotton On Group Digital Application Manager David Wells shares his insights on how Avocado helped deliver an order to fulfilment monitoring solution.
Getting a better perspective
The Cotton On Group wanted to make improvements and create greater visibility of orders across its websites and back-end systems, to provide effective customer support during peak periods. Expecting a significant amount of growth in the new year, David explained, the online channel needed to be optimised to maintain the Group’s strong customer service capabilities.
“We wanted to optimise order processing times through the various parts of our online ordering systems, from order to fulfilment. To do this, we needed to have a more granular view of each part of the process to better understand where we could make improvements.” David said.
“With visibility across the entire fulfilment process, we could provide an extraordinary delivery outcome for our customers.”
The Cotton On Group solution
At the time, the Cotton On Group Digital team was in contact with Avocado regarding their digital strategy.
Avocado proposed the Order to Fulfilment (O2F) monitoring solution using the Splunk cloud platform. This solution would track orders across the Group’s back-end systems to provide:
- Functionality to find and flag orders that needed to be addressed.
- Greater visibility across systems.
- The ability to pull up delivery timings and statuses.
- A way to find performance issues and identify areas for improvement.
The project began in April 2016 with an initial three-week discovery phase. Avocado worked with subject-matter experts from the Cotton On Group to verify the feasibility of the proposed O2F system and determine the full scope of the project.
Once the details were agreed on, Avocado designed and implemented the solution by extracting and linking real-time data from multiple back-end systems and presenting the linked data in a single Splunk schema – displayed in easily readable dashboards and supported by a digital assistant named ‘OrderMon’.
The end solution not only helped the Cotton On Group meet its operational objectives but also provided a platform for customer self-service. This reduces the demand on customer support and improves the customer experience.
Why Avocado?
Visibility was one of the key goals for the Cotton On Group, and the O2F system fully delivered. It provided a wider perspective on the ordering system and gave them the tools needed to identify where they needed to focus on during the fulfilment process.
“One of the main reasons we chose Avocado was their flexibility and understanding of our business needs.”
“OrderMon is a fantastic tool! It allows us to track where our orders are at any given time, what the performance of our orders are, and gives us useful information to do some really great analytics,” David said.
The O2F system met expectations, and the Cotton On Group team found Avocado to be an excellent partner.
“One of the main reasons we chose Avocado was their flexibility and understanding of our business needs,” David said.
“Here at the Cotton On Group, things change rapidly. Avocado was very flexible and able to accommodate us by putting in and prioritising the features we saw as important. They hit the nail on the head with the requirements and delivered exactly what we were after.”
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