How a Global Telco Created Omnichannel Digital Retail Experiences

The Challenge

In-store experience has become a key marker of the customer experience that brands wish to deliver. One of UK’s leading telecom enterprises wanted to take this a step further, and  create an in-store experience that is customized to each of the 21 geographically diverse markets that it served.

Their existing digital price tag solution revolved around showcasing price information on the screen of the respective devices on display at the store. So cell phones of specific brands or iPads had their price and specs displayed on the screen, and customers could review these as they wanted.

However, the variety of screen sizes across devices meant that the content (price and specs) needed  to be reformatted for each specific device on display, to render effectively across all screens or device

This, and other technological drawbacks in the existing solution left the telco grappling with significant challenges in:

• Effectively delivering well-designed in-store experiences to its customer
• Creating customized and flexible in-store experiences that could evolve on the fly, with changing conditions in specific store locations
• Ensuring brand consistency in terms of visual presentation, across different store locations

The Solution

The client wanted to transform their retail store experience, with a specific focus on revamping their existing application for digital price tags.

They were looking for a way to create consistent yet flexible in-store customer experience. They needed centralised content and design management to deliver customizable, responsive pricing information for products across stores in various geographies.

The key objectives of the project were:

• Create a centralized application to deliver product and pricing information through a standardized framework
• Enable teams in different markets to customize product and pricing information across various items, stores, and regions
• Establish a global asset library for layouts, templates, components, and content, that could be used by relevant teams

Along with these, the client also had some specific requirements with respect to the project:

• Shift their hosting to new servers, managed for a year
• Build the new digital price tags solution on Drupal 8, instead of Drupal 7 where it currently existed

To address these challenges, the Srijan team proposed to build a solution with two core components:

An omni-channel CMS for digital stores, built on Drupal 8

This was designed to act as the hub of a highly scalable solution platform, leveraging Drupal to do what it does best - act as a content repository for all product and pricing information. This enabled teams across different geographies to create contextual content for their stores, that would display effectively across different screens and channels. 

A global template framework 

This allowed client teams to structure pricing and product information as per their regional market needs and trends, using a pre-approved set of elements. This ensured brand consistency across stores while still retaining the flexibility to dynamically change prices and offers. 

Here'a deep dive into how we built this omnichannel digital price tag solution with decoupled Drupal.

Creating a Future-Ready Digital Store Solution

While the scope of this particular project was limited to creating a digital price tag solution, the model can be scaled to deliver a complete digital retail store experience.

The solution, based on a decoupled Drupal architecture, can be scaled and integrated with multiple systems. From serving content onto handheld screens, it can be adapted to interface to digital kiosks, in-store promotional banners, digital signage and more. The Global Template Framework can be integrated with other systems which can store and provide additional content via APIs. And the solution can be tweaked to suit the digital experience needs of any retail establishment.

Business Benefits

With the revamped digital price tag solution in place, the client was able to roll out an enhanced in-store experience across stores in 21 EMEA countries.

More importantly, the solution was gave the client’s geographically dispersed teams some major advantages like:

• Increased market autonomy on presenting the content and offers in the style and language of their choice
• Reusable components used across the channels, which meant almost zero time and effort goes into effectively displaying content for different channels
• The client can utilize the same system with templates for the consumer facing portal as well

Telecom enterprises are urgently driving their digital transformation to stay relevant for their customers. Whether it's revamping in-store price tags, to analyzing and fixing customer churn, to diversifying revenue streams with telecom APIs - there's a lot to be done. And an expert technology partner is key to making this possible.

Srijan is working with global telecom enterprises to drive digital growth. Let's start the conversation and explore how we can help achieve your business goals.