James Avery Artisan Jewelry is a family-owned company that offers high-quality, artfully crafted jewelry in sterling silver, gold, and gemstones. James Avery designs, manufactures, markets, and sells its products, which are available in multiple locations around the United States, and nationwide through its website, JamesAvery.com.
Challenge
Attentive engagement with its customers is one of the foundations of James Avery’s success, and it is something they are very proud of. When the organization wanted to improve customer service engagement for their Buy Online, Pickup in store process, the jeweler sought a solution.
Buy Online, Pickup in store is growing fast, and improvements needed to be made to scale to demand. Retail associates required the ability to react to these types of orders and service customers quickly. Customers also needed quick and efficient handling of their transactions.
The integration between their Point Of Sale (POS) system and their back-end Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) system required associates to wait for packing slips printed at the rear office machine. They could then confirm item availability and finally confirm the pickup in EBS.
There is no time for going back and forth between systems in busy seasons such as Christmas, graduations, Mother’s Day, etc. To keep customer contact and keep sales moving, retail associates would manually take down client information and then enter it at the end of the day. This methodology created the risk of inventory discrepancies.
As the busy seasons were fast approaching, the solution had to be built quickly, and the jeweler’s development team needed support for a smooth rollout to all stores.
Solution
Insum created a user-friendly and visually attractive application that retail associates now use to react quickly to Buy Online, Pick up in store orders. This application allows immediate visibility of the orders, directly confirms the availability of ordered items at the store, and most importantly, allows the associate to keep the customer engaged during the entire checkout process.
The application also includes a responsive design, giving it the flexibility to be utilized from a desktop computer, an iPad, a POS, or a mobile POS.
Approach/Technology Used
The solution required seamless integration between the jeweler’s Oracle E-business Suite system and the existing POS system for user authentication. To ensure efficient data structure, collection, and management, Insum used Oracle APEX, Oracle’s web-based rapid application development platform. Working closely with the James Avery development team and certain James Avery power users, Insum developed and delivered a slick web-based application. It includes a list of open orders, inventory confirmation, customer notification, and documentation of in-store customer pickup. The combination of these functionalities has eliminated the need for repeated trips to the back office.
Oracle APEX also contains powerful built-in reporting tools and custom reporting views which significantly accelerated development and helped reduce costs.
Deployment of the application to all locations was simply a matter of sending them a URL by email.
Results
The new application provides a quick turnaround time for Buy Online, Pickup in store orders. Retail associates spend much less time order handling since they are using only one system. They have also become more proactive in their order preparation as confirmation of on-hand inventory is updated in real-time, and the customer is quickly advised of their order’s availability.
In short, there has been an increase in the overall efficiency of the process and an improvement in the attentive customer engagement that James Avery continually strives for.
“The goal was to solve our associates’ pain points they had with the Buy Online, Pickup in store process. We did this by simplifying the transactions and keeping the associates out front with our customers instead of in the back office. Creating the Portal for them allowed them to service our customers better and ensured transactions were 100% complete.
–Mike King, Senior Oracle E-Business Suite Business Analyst, James Avery
“Implementing the Buy Online, Pickup in store portal to retail was a huge win. It allowed associates to quickly confirm order availability, provide pickup confirmation through signature capture, and reduce associate efforts as they completed multiple tasks to manage inventory.”
-Andrew Davidson, Retail Operations Initiatives Manager, James Avery
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