Many seek out meaningful gifts in the form of jewelry and in Germany, CHRIST fills that demand for everyone—from a couple in a young budding romance looking for a small trinket to those who are seeking out luxurious diamond accessories.

As the leading jeweler in Germany, CHRIST is no stranger to the evolution of the jewelry industry. What has not evolved is CHRIST’s longstanding commitment to delivering top-of-the-line customer experience every step of the way. Leaning into its strong heritage and market presence, CHRIST focused on ensuring that digital transformation was top priority as they explored how to deliver the best omnichannel customer experience. They outlined 3 main goals for this journey:

1. Commitment to their brand and customer trust to tell their story and preserve their heritage at every touchpoint, building confidence and loyalty in their brand along the way
2. Deliver value for the cost,  ensuring that every customer, whether they are everyday shoppers or high-end clientele, receive the highest quality products at fair prices
3. Provide a seamless purchasing journey  that is consistent, respectful, and thoughtful for every channel–turning gift givers into repeat purchasers

Organization and digital transformation go hand in hand

In 2013, CHRIST undertook a complete organizational transformation to achieve these goals and become an omnichannel-first company by bringing in crucial functions in-house to nurture knowledge transfer and in-house expertise. This move allowed for the team to ensure they have better control over every channel they touched, whether it was point of sale, email, web and more recently even added Mobile Wallet to further strengthen their customer experience and bridge the gap between online and offline. Initially a very small team of 10, CHRIST grew their e-commerce team to over 100 members over the last decade and has dedicated smaller teams within each to each functional area.

As the teams were built, they adopted technologies, like SAP Customer Experience (CX) solutions, that empower CHRIST to put their customers at the center of everything they do. SAP Commerce Cloud plays a pivotal role in their operations, particularly in order management and ship-from-store capabilities. These features enable efficient inventory management and order fulfillment from multiple locations, ensuring timely deliveries. The platform’s composable approach also allows CHRIST to integrate best-of-breed tools, providing them with the flexibility needed to deliver exceptional customer experiences. More than 200 stores are connected to the webshops and are actively shipping out orders directly to the customers.

With SAP Emarsys, CHRIST has been able to reimagine customer engagement. Emarsys helps them consolidate sales data, behavioral data, and historical data into a single platform, making it easier better understand their shoppers to drive repeat purchases–increasing their revenue by 30-40% compared to last year. In turn, CHRIST is also able to automate more personalized marketing campaigns, like birthday promotions and loyalty rewards. They have also operationalized their marketing efforts to maximize their time and creativity.  Using pre-built tactics, they can now create a campaign in under an hour and be inspired to create new campaigns that drive impact.

Preparing for high stakes holiday sales

CHRIST always strives to create memorable moments for their customers so ensuring that they can easily search, discover, shop and receive their purchases in a timely manner is critical. Cyber Week is a priority event for CHRIST to achieve their revenue targets, despite economic challenges. This means ensuring that their marketing campaigns are personalized and targeted, their sites have 100% uptime and are reliable, their content feeds to their sites seamlessly, orders are fulfilled in a timely fashion and accurately, and any customer service requests are solved efficiently. With SAP CX solutions, CHRIST was able to achieve 99.9% in availability with a traffic increase by 150%.

Staying relevant means continuously evolving

CHRIST is by no means finish with their digital transformation journey.  The future is shiny for CHRIST and to remain that way, they have a clear idea of their future roadmap to stay digital focused. AI, like many other retailers, are top of mind to support generating product data and personalized recommendations. CHRIST also plans to leverage AI to improve customer engagement by better understanding the data they have collected. From there, they will be able to enhance their segmentation strategy and drive more precision marketing efforts.

CHRIST’s digital transformation journey underscores the criticality of adopting modern technology, automation tools, and feature-rich platforms to enhance customer engagement across all channels, ultimately driving profitable growth. As CHRIST continues to explore new innovations, ways of harnessing data, and more, their commitment to providing personalized and memorable experiences remains steadfast.