From Boots to Boden: the rise of digital incumbents

Boden reaps rewards of modernisation

Four years ago, cloth­ing retail­er Boden embarked on a dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion jour­ney.

The com­pa­ny – which has more than 1.5 mil­lion cus­tomers world­wide – launched boden.com in 1999. How­ev­er, it realised that the lega­cy tech it had relied on for years was no longer suf­fi­cient to enable the real-time respon­sive­ness need­ed in retail today. Ulti­mate­ly, the sys­tems in place for cat­a­logue-dri­ven sales were strug­gling to keep up with the company’s growth and new omnichan­nel, dig­i­tal-first approach.

Boden sought to cre­ate a new IT archi­tec­ture based on microser­vices and data in motion — that is data that is being trans­ferred or moved. This allowed it to mod­ernise, rather than replace essen­tial sys­tems, and facil­i­tat­ed the shift from cat­a­logue to online sales. It meant mov­ing away from the tra­di­tion­al approach of run­ning reports overnight to instead be able to see what was hap­pen­ing in real time.

Through con­nect­ing all its data foot­prints with event stream­ing via Con­flu­ent’s data plat­form, Boden says it is now able to ben­e­fit from mod­ernised infra­struc­ture, real-time ana­lyt­ics, enhanced CX, improved effi­cien­cy and cost reduc­tion, as well as increased click­through rates and rev­enue.

Adidas: a box-fresh transformation

In 2017, Adi­das CEO Kasper Rørst­ed said the company’s “sin­gle most impor­tant store in the world is our dot-com store – there is no com­par­i­son”.

Adi­das set an ambi­tious goal to quadru­ple its online sales to €4 bil­lion by 2020, which became a life­line when 70% of its phys­i­cal stores were closed dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. In 2021, the €4 bil­lion goal was sur­passed.

“Big retail­ers have had to think dif­fer­ent­ly about how they reach cus­tomers and doing so dig­i­tal­ly has tak­en on much more impor­tance. Par­tic­u­lar­ly through­out the pan­dem­ic, many retail­ers invest­ed in ecom­merce strate­gies as more than a con­tin­gency mea­sure and instead as a way to stay resilient to change,” says Runeberg.

For an online store, speed direct­ly trans­lates to rev­enue in the form of con­ver­sion and reduced bounce rates. For Adi­das, web­page load times reduced by 60%, sig­nif­i­cant­ly increas­ing con­ver­sion rates and over­all rev­enue for the brand.

“Togeth­er with Adi­das, we want­ed to improve dis­cov­er­abil­i­ty and sto­ry­telling on the site, ensur­ing that vis­it­ing adidas.com would feel like step­ping into an actu­al store,” says Runeberg. While ‘expe­ri­en­tial shop­ping’ is often dis­cussed, in prac­tice this means “keep­ing up with rapid­ly chang­ing con­sumer demands and expec­ta­tions”, she adds.

Thames Water customers tap digital dividends

Thames Water is the largest waste and util­i­ties com­pa­ny in the UK, pro­vid­ing ser­vices to 15 mil­lion peo­ple across Lon­don and the Thames Val­ley. The com­pa­ny has under­tak­en a whole­sale dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, which includes a move from lega­cy on-premis­es infra­struc­ture to mod­ern cloud plat­forms.

The chal­lenge fac­ing the pre­vi­ous sys­tem was an inabil­i­ty to man­age peak con­tact traf­fic dur­ing times of cri­sis, which risked leav­ing cus­tomers unsup­port­ed when they need help the most. This includes the impact of nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, such as the ‘Beast from the East’ win­ter storms. It put pres­sure on the exist­ing call sys­tem, risk­ing leav­ing cus­tomers unsup­port­ed or unable to be divert­ed to the cor­rect help sys­tems.

Mike Pot­ter was exec­u­tive direc­tor for dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and group CIO at Thames Water dur­ing the project. “His­tor­i­cal­ly, severe weath­er events prove par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult for Thames Water, with the sheer amount of cus­tomer enquiries mean­ing it’s almost impos­si­ble to man­age,” he says. “These expe­ri­ences caused us to realise the need to invest in dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion to ensure such dif­fi­cul­ties weren’t faced again.”

The com­pa­ny worked with con­sul­tan­cy firm Teck­n­uo­vo to turn around a rapid dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion project, with the first three APIs designed, built and deployed into a live envi­ron­ment, a first for Thames Water. This took place with­in weeks dur­ing the nation­al lock­down over the 2020 fes­tive peri­od. Since the ini­tial go-live date in Feb 2021, the team designed an addi­tion­al 18 inte­gra­tions with­in 10 weeks of require­ments being agreed.

Upon com­ple­tion, the con­tact cen­tre will be able to process more than 1,500 con­cur­rent calls, triple its orig­i­nal num­ber. The trans­for­ma­tion led to a 52% reduc­tion in the num­ber of cus­tomer com­plaints being referred to The Con­sumer Coun­cil for Water between March and Octo­ber 2021.

Suc­cess­ful dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion projects often rely on peer recog­ni­tion and prov­ing the val­ue of the project ear­ly on to inter­nal stake­hold­ers, accord­ing to Pot­ter. 

“Any busi­ness look­ing to embark on such a project should take advan­tage of the pow­er of sto­ry­telling as a vehi­cle to show­case ear­ly suc­cess in a way that engages every­one, whether tech­ni­cal­ly mind­ed or more con­cerned with cus­tomer expe­ri­ence or the bot­tom line,” he says. “The stronger the suc­cess sto­ry, the quick­er inter­nal con­fi­dence grows.”

BT focuses on the customer experience

BT is under­go­ing “a dra­mat­ic trans­for­ma­tion behind the scenes” as it looks to mod­ernise its under­pin­ning tech­nol­o­gy and plat­form, accord­ing to the com­pa­ny.

This includes rethink­ing how teams col­lab­o­rate to build and ship prod­ucts. BT reor­gan­ised its prod­uct, engi­neer­ing and design teams into a prod­uct squad mod­el, where small­er, more flex­i­ble teams owned end-to-end deliv­ery account­abil­i­ty of their prod­ucts.

While this encour­aged a more col­lab­o­ra­tive approach, it also high­light­ed work­flow prob­lems. These includ­ed too many dif­fer­ent tools, inef­fi­cient process­es, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion hur­dles, which meant more time on ver­sion con­trol – track­ing and man­ag­ing changes to soft­ware code – than tack­ling the prob­lems it need­ed to solve.

BT react­ed quick­ly, deploy­ing a col­lab­o­ra­tive design plat­form called Fig­ma for design­ing and ship­ping prod­ucts. It now says it has replaced siloed work­ing and han­dovers with con­tin­u­al col­lab­o­ra­tion that can be done from any­where, boost­ing teams’ agili­ty, speed, effi­cien­cy and trans­paren­cy. It can also go from wire­frames  — a blue­print or skele­ton of a con­cept – to click­able pro­to­types more rapid­ly, allow­ing BT to rapid­ly iter­ate its prod­uct deliv­ery.

“We’ve saved 50% of our design costs and ele­vat­ed the impor­tance of design with­in the organ­i­sa­tion,” says Lee. “This means a greater focus on the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence comes through in our prod­ucts and ser­vices, some­thing we know will go a long way in ensur­ing we keep our cus­tomers’ needs front and cen­tre of every­thing we do.”