PANDORA Charms Customers with Better Marketing Thanks to New CRM

The Challenge

This international jewelry company wanted to connect retail-store customer data to online-sales customer data to gain a more holistic view of customer behavior for better, more personalized marketing.

The Solution

AIS built an elegant connector between the company’s Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer relationship management (CRM) system that housed online sales data and 7,900 retail point-of-sales (POS) systems.

The Results

PANDORA now has a 360-degree view of its millions of customers, which allows it to do more effective targeted marketing.

Build an elegant connector and analytics engine

PANDORA brought in AIS to capture retail-store customer data in its CRM. AIS used Microsoft Azure App Service to build an elegant connector for linking the CRM with 7,900 heterogeneous POS systems, using a technology-agnostic REST API that simplified connection with a wide range of POS systems.

In addition to building the connector, we used Microsoft Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake Store, and Azure Data Lake Analytics to create a consumer insights system that PANDORA marketers use to analyze purchase data and design targeted email campaigns using Adobe Campaign Manager.

Do more personalized target marketing

With all customer data in one place, PANDORA has a single view of its millions of customers, so it can analyze purchase trends across all sales channels and reach out to customers in more personalized ways.

Maintain great performance at lower costs

The company’s existing Dynamics 365 infrastructure couldn’t handle the dramatic increase in customer records that came with the addition of retail store data, so AIS engineered around the limits to ensure great performance, even during peak periods.

PANDORA had previously over-provisioned servers to ensure adequate Dynamics 365 performance—a big cost burden when those servers weren’t needed. AIS tuned the CRM-related services and implemented Azure auto-scaling to deliver needed compute power on demand, significantly reducing infrastructure costs.

Improve resilience and security

We also used Azure services to ensure extremely high availability levels, so that PANDORA marketers always have access to customer data, and customers always have access to their online personal profiles and wish lists. Because PANDORA is a Danish company, we also helped ensure that the solution was GDPR-compliant.

Deliver quickly, refresh frequently

We delivered this solution in about six months, which thrilled the customer; the original CRM took years to roll out. We also helped the PANDORA development team adopt DevOps efficiencies so that they can deploy new production releases a couple of times a week, keeping PANDORA’s customer-facing sites and internal marketing systems fresh and compelling.