Home furnishings retailer develops next-gen cloud-based engagement platform
Crate and Barrel is taking its omnichannel experience into its own hands.
The home furnishings chain is the latest retailer to join forces with Infor to co-develop the Infor CloudSuite Retail, a suite of application offerings that can be tailored to an individual retailer’s needs. The software prod-uct is designed to deliver superior interactions for store associates and consumers.
"When the opportunity arose to work alongside Infor to create a next-generation system built upon 21st century thinking, we were excited," said Mike Relich, COO, Crate and Barrel. "Infor's end user approach to development will be combined with our knowledge of what goes into unique product offerings to produce a user experience that is not only beautiful, but one that allows us to disrupt the industry.”
With such easy access to information on the Web, retailers need a way to providing consistent, accurate, and engaging product information across multiple touch points to successfully interact with today's consumers. However, delivering the best customer experience isn't solely achieved by front-end, customer-facing solutions.
It also requires the alignment of solutions enterprise-wide, and a modern-ized foundation that can manage unlimited big data attributes, and sup-port machine learning to analyze trends. There result is more fluid, frus-tration-free interactions among consumers and employees.
By integrating the Infor CloudSuite Retail platform to the network, the architecture sources information from multiple suppliers, and uses ma-chine learning to understand trends needed to create a seamless shopping experience and speed up time-to-market for new products.
“Tracking all of our product information became cumbersome and repeti-tive, and we reached a level where this key component of merchandising needed to be automated," said Relich. "We immediately saw value in partnering with Infor and taking advantage of the great platform they are building."