Elevating the customer experience (CX) remains a hot topic for retailers in 2019, with many investing in a range of CX programs and tools to keep up with the digitally-empowered consumer across all channels.
One prominent retailer leading the way in this domain is the Cotton On Group. Last year it launched 'Perks' – a global loyalty program that encompasses all the Group's brands under one state-of-the-art scheme.
For most retailers operating at a similar scale to Cotton On – the business runs 1,500+ stores across twenty countries and seven brands – bringing a loyalty program like Perks to life would have been a major technological, procedural and financial challenge. But, not for Cotton On.
For more than a decade, Cotton On has operated with a significant competitive advantage, which sets it apart from most retailers – it runs a single, dynamic retail management system that handles the bulk of its operations for all its brands, worldwide.
Having a single source of real-time truth about products, customers and stores (still rare in retail today) was a fundamental reason why getting Perks up and running was fast and easy. The results speak for themselves: the velocity and volume of membership uptake has set a high bar for the industry.
Cotton On's global retail management IT infrastructure relies on Retail Directions' consumer-centric software platform, which powers its stores and high-throughput transactional system, manages a vast customer database, and runs a whole spectrum of functions at head office.
Group Director Ash Hardwick has
