When the Colgate-Palmolive Company needed a new platform to improve customer experience and user functionality, it chose Hybris to drive B2B ecommerce growth across core brands and channels. As a global consumer products company, this has helped Colgate greatly enhance online customer engagement with a multitude of new and existing consumers across numerous countries.
During the SAPinsider’s CRM conference presented by SAP last week in Las Vegas, Kris O’Brien, E-Commerce Manager for Colgate-Palmolive’s Global Information Technology division, delivered an informative presentation on this subject. O’Brien spoke to attendees regarding his role as a leading design, development, and delivery expert for the brand’s various B2B online channels. He also expounded on how the integration of hybris has built better customer experiences for Colgate clients across North and Latin American, Europe, and Asia.
Prior to the recent introduction of Hybris, Colgate had, for years, neglected to significantly invest in an upgraded ecommerce platform. Recently, however, key clients around the world, including members of the professional dental industry and countless major wholesalers and distributors, began showing interest in a more advanced online customer experience. Colgate immediately set out to meet these growing demands by building an innovative system to help clients order and catalogue the vast array of products it produces.
To be successful, Colgate understood that a new system had to meet a number of crucial criteria. In addition to supporting future modifications and being able to evolve and adapt with changing needs as they arose, the system had to improve stability and scalability. Most importantly, it had to emphasize front-end and back-end accessibility and functionality for a seamlessly integrated customer experience across multiple channels.
“The focus on customer experience was huge for us and it started to become a much bigger focus as we started to work with Hybris, which is external customer facing,” O’Brien said. “Generally, an internal solution is easy. You can talk to the marketing folks and say, ‘sit in front of this laptop, and give me your feedback.’ It is a different story when you’re relying on customers who are trying to run their own businesses. You are putting a burden on their time. But we needed their feedback, because we needed to understand from the business owners who are actually going to use the platform.”
To ensure success, O’Brien detailed the methodology that Colgate used to achieve their targeted level of excellence. O’Brien laid out the game plan for setting and managing expectations with the businesses that ultimately benefited from the Hybris platform.
Colgate’s methodology included an exhaustively comprehensive and interconnected list of sessions that considered all angles of the project’s development. From design to launch and beyond, these sessions included:
1) User Research to successfully gauge client personas, which enabled customized specifications to be built according to the personalized needs of each major client.
2) Familiarization Sessions to set initial expectations and allow users to gain an advanced preview of the designs as they were being worked on.
3) Real-time Testing through representative focus groups. This allowed Colgate to get feedback throughout the entire process. It also allowed developers to consider the possibility of adding features for future versions and updates.
4) Surveys, which ultimately allowed Colgate to see, even long after the initial launch, if clients were struggling with a particular feature and to correct unexpected problems. This feedback was then constantly fed back into the development cycle.
“We have had some very good requests from customers during some of the sessions,” O’Brien said. “Many of our users had already been using other B2B sites, and they were able to tell us what kind of support they needed based on that prior experience. And now, because we see them using our site more often, they feel that we really helped them.”
Throughout development, Colgate was very exacting in its measures to account for the specific B2B and B2C needs of each client. This personalized level of customer engagement was key. Because as a major global player, Colgate supports such a wide breadth of retailers, distributors, and industry professionals that they had to somehow balance and manage an enormous number of unique client needs. Leveraging Hybris’ vast capabilities helped Colgate accomplish this feat.
What’s more, Colgate also assembled special ecommerce teams to work directly with Hybris to manage new client integration and facilitate the customer service process across channels. Alongside continual post-launch system architecture review, these teams also offer project support for both existing and prospective clients. This also includes the management of a detailed Hybris wiki, which is a comprehensive resource containing a multitude of product information, downloads, licensing pieces, a peer forum, education and training documents, and more
Colgate took great pains to develop a customer-facing end-to-end platform that would greatly enhance the customer experience. And Hybris provided the right partnership to help build the tools that Colgate’s clients actually need and use. But the system was not based on conjecture or without user consideration. Colgate systematically researched, tested, and retested the functionally across every channel to increase and enhance online performance and the customer experience.
Colgate’s approach with Hybris was and is, as O’Brien succinctly stated, “Completely focused on the customer.”
About the Author: Mark Johnson
Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs.