Unlocking omnichannel revenue

This retailer has more than 1,000 stores, employs more than 75,000 people and serves almost 6 million customers every year.

We worked with the client on a complete rebuild and redesign of their entire web offering while also creating a new mobile app for one of the largest areas of the business.

These developments were part of a long-term business plan that achieved 41% uplift in conversions, reduced crash rates and generated more than 8 million of pounds of extra revenue after launch.

Three big factors influenced the client’s decision to partner with Valtech:

• Integration needs. The client needed coordination with efficiency and integration with reusability across the group. We provided expert architectural recommendations borne out of experience to become a trusted partner.

• High standards of delivery. The relationship began through mobile excellence, but it evolved thanks to our ability to deliver and exceed expectations time and time again.

• Internal capability. We helped develop in-house knowledge and expertise to enable our client to get to MVP with the highest degree of confidence and the lowest initial investment.

This two-and-a-half-year project allowed for an enriching evolution for both parties as we endeavored to keep our client relevant in a highly competitive environment.

Our expert team forged a strong partnership that not only met existing requirements for the company, but also set the internal team up for the prospective requirements around recruitment and critical rollouts.

This project was a story rooted in iteration. It focused on demonstrating high-quality delivery on everything from the first line of code to the final release and subsequent tests.

It wasn’t our objective to bring about a revolution. Instead, we helped the customer experience evolve through the kind of innovation that would improve conversion rates, reduce crash rates and set the new standard of delivery within the business.

Outstanding engineering

Our engineering team created a React Native application that vastly improved the customer experience and combined native- and web-based technology with a web-based checkout flow to unlock significant value.

Our approach to engineering meant that we could also deliver a bespoke back-end service and a mobile channel API that aggregated non-mobile optimized APIs, custom functionality and integration within the client's current loyalty scheme.

Consistency and reusability were key components of the success of this project. Our client required a level of integration that worked for multiple brands. Our engineering team was more than equipped to deliver this.

Dynamic design

Our ability to provide creative excellence at every stage of the project relied on two distinct design disciplines, one for a website makeover and another for an app changeover to an ecommerce platform.

For the former, we took a feasible, focused and lean approach to designing a system on native and responsive web that was easy to use, consistent with previous designs and appealing to a large customer base — all while ensuring the replicability of components for their other brands.

For the latter, we took the app experience above and beyond those of their competitors with an experimental philosophy that tested the grounds on which the application was based — all while employing the creative freedom that such a task allowed.

We’re focused on creating sustainable solutions for our clients. We knew from the beginning that we had to futureproof our client’s team by imparting knowledge and expertise from our own lean team.

A collaborative full-circle journey from discovery to build and then back to discovery again meant that we created capability within the internal team instead of a dependency on our external resources.

Moreover, their trust in us was such that the client tasked another team with product order and kiosk development once the initial launch team had wound down.

Valtech’s insights and intuition allowed our client to improve its internal agility and productivity without compromising the quality of their customer experiences. This increased the scope of the work at hand to improve not only the website and the app as immediate requirements, but crucially the overall digital ecosystem of the parent company itself.

What began as one small aspect a long-term project evolved to include a whole host of other features, in and out of store, representing how we delivered great, reusable work for the entire organization.

We delivered the first beta version of the app to senior stakeholders in just 14 weeks, and we coached the team throughout on our Agile ways of working so they could enjoy longer-lasting benefits. This set our client up for a future of fantastic customer experiences with a second-to-none digital experience.