BESTSELLER ONLY dresses up omnichannel retail with Dynamics 365

BESTSELLER is a fashion company founded in 1975 as a single store in Denmark. Today, the family-owned business has grown to include over 20 brands including JACK & JONES, JUNAROSE, VILA CLOTHES, NAME IT, and VERO MODA. BESTSELLER brands design clothes and accessories for all ages, genders, and occasions sold in more than 16,000 multi-brand and department stores and 2,700 retail stores in more than 70 markets worldwide. ONLY, one of 20+ brands in BESTSELLER's portfolio, blends quality, affordability, and on-trend designs. Denim is at the heart of ONLY's offerings, and the brand has become a go-to choice for stylish jeans, jackets, and skirts. Its products are available in more than 4,500 stores across Europe and online.

Dominating the fashion industry takes more than great fit and affordable prices. Today’s quickly shifting fashion retail landscape demands a seamless and enjoyable experience in-store and online. When BESTSELLER was looking for an even more personalized experience for their shoppers, it made sense to power customer loyalty and drive new growth by adding the online, first party eCommerce experience to its solution enabling a frictionless omnichannel customer journey. In ONLY, BESTSELLER saw an opportunity to significantly enhance customer loyalty through a deeper understanding of shoppers’ buying preferences and the rewards that appeal to them.

The company used Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, Supply Chain Management and Customer Insights to realize the potential in its customer data, transforming shopping into an enjoyable and frictionless experience both in-store and online. The Dynamics 365 omnichannel retail platform allows ONLY to provide the type of service that’s usually reserved for the most elite customers at the most exclusive stores, driving both customer loyalty and growth.

Great service is always in fashion

ONLY implemented Dynamics 365 focusing on growth, automation, and customer experience in its e-commerce and store operations for inventory visibility, assortment management, delivery information, and customer profile management. The distributed order management solution optimizes the fulfillment process, adapting to changes in orders, supplier availability, and demand spikes. Loyalty features allow customers to earn and redeem points, receive personalized coupons, and use their loyalty benefits both online and in-store.

Whether a shopping experience is ultimately successful or not comes down to availability. It’s more important than ever that stores have the right inventory at the right time. Now that a simple scan of a box provides complete visibility into the accuracy of a shipment, ONLY warehouse teams can make any necessary stock adjustments much faster and more easily. Fulfillment data is automatically linked to the e-commerce platform to accurately reflect availability, allowing online shoppers to place orders with confidence that stated delivery timelines will be accurate.

It’s not only customers who are happier. ONLY employees have also seen benefits from the automation that’s available in Dynamics 365. Millions of ONLY orders go out each year. Mistakes happen and sometimes packages are lost. It was true before Dynamics 365 and it’s true today. However, understanding and remediating order inaccuracies used to be an onerous manual process that required multiple people and hours of time. Now, the process is streamlined, automated, and efficient.

Styling in-store experiences

What makes an omnichannel retail platform like Dynamics 365 such a game-changer isn’t just the data that it makes available. It’s also the speed with which ONLY can act on its data. Dynamics 365 Commerce makes it extraordinarily easy to adjust sales to respond to market conditions in real time. One change can easily be rolled out to all points of sale (POS), where store employees need only scan an item to see that a promotion has been activated and offer it to the customer. If competitors offer discounts to lure ONLY’s customers with lower prices, ONLY can quickly respond with better promotions and advertise them through the loyalty app and social media. The system keeps up with the changes so that sales staff can focus on providing swift and helpful service.

Dynamics 365 Commerce offers ways to engage customers during in-store checkouts as well. Dual-screen displays show customers their receipts, promotional campaigns, videos, and images that are designed to enhance their shopping experience, along with a way to rate the store.

Perhaps most importantly, the dual-screen displays are one way that ONLY is working towards a cleaner planet. BESTSELLER’s Fashion FWD initiative is the company’s promise to reduce its carbon footprint. ONLY and other BESTSELLER brands are committed to removing more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than the company emits. Using a cloud-based platform makes the company more energy-efficient. The dual-screen display’s ability to capture an electronic signature and show interactive visuals eliminates the need for paper receipts and countertop postcard promotions, reducing paper waste.

“Dynamics 365 is a net win across the business. Users love it for its easy and intuitive interface, and the automation efficiencies free ONLY employees to focus on our top priorities: exceptional customer service while reducing our carbon footprint,” explains Allan Helligso Svinth, Retail Director, ONLY stores.

Agility at scale through distributed order management

A critical component of ONLY’s agility comes from DOM in Dynamics 365 Commerce. ONLY’s omnichannel purchasing choices mean more customer journeys to get right. With fulfillment options to suit every scenario, DOS supports buy online, pick up in store, ship from store, and curbside pickup. Because ONLY doesn’t have a main distribution center, each of its 100 Danish stores acts as a mini-warehouse, which can introduce time-intensive and costly shipping complications. The ship-from-store capability is an enormous time-saver in configuring the fastest, most cost-efficient fulfillment option. The company estimates that the time that’s saved on sales dispatches and return processing has increased turnover by 10% year-over-year. Dynamics 365 also offers enhanced visibility for smarter replenishment and an accurate display of product availability across channels. ONLY customers have the smoothest, most direct path to fulfillment.

The scale at which Dynamics 365 can power such an innovative fulfillment approach is enormous. On peak shopping days, ONLY processes nearly 1 million transactions. Seconds saved on each one makes an enormous difference. “With Dynamics 365, the business has saved hundreds of hours thanks to optimizing and automating our manual processes,” says Stefan Hauge, Senior Project Manager, BESTSELLER.

Finally, DOM supports the company’s sustainability goals. Along with the ability to buy online and return in-store, ONLY customers have the most environmentally friendly shipping options available.

Customer loyalty for the win-win

Customer loyalty has always been a priority for ONLY, which operates, like all BESTSELLER brands, with a family-minded philosophy that honors the company’s founding principles. Consumers have access to more sellers than ever, propelling loyalty to the top of the retail industry’s priorities and amping up an already competitive market.

ONLY leads in customer loyalty thanks to tailored communications that are based on intelligence gathered by Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Customers receive only sales and product information that’s relevant to them, making their click rate much higher than with untargeted campaigns.

Customers earn loyalty rewards that are converted into vouchers that keep them shopping online and in-store. The loyalty impact on basket size is significant—roughly double the size of a shopper who isn’t a member of the rewards program. As customers use their benefits, the company collects richer data, which allows it to create more customized marketing, which yields higher sales and greater customer satisfaction. It’s truly a win-win virtuous circle.

ONLY’s loyalty numbers have skyrocketed. Before the company started using the loyalty features in Dynamics 365 Commerce, the lone measure of loyalty was the number of the company’s followers on Instagram, which hovered around 80,000 for years. After activating the loyalty program, ONLY Denmark amassed more than 250,000 new members in less than two years.

The customer connection is deepened with an “exceptional level of service that we can only deliver because we’re using the Dynamics 365 platform end to end,” says Kim Guldager, Product Owner, BESTSELLER. Thanks to Dynamics 365 Commerce and Customer Insights, ONLY provides the type of service that’s usually associated with luxury brands. The typically high turnover rate of young retail store employees sometimes resulted in less than stellar service. Now, even the newest employees can identify elite customers and treat them as VIPs thanks to the visibility of loyalty data at every POS.

Before Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, it would have seemed counterintuitive that taking a more personal approach to customer service could lead to increased sales and time and cost savings. But ONLY has found that using its own data on its own platform does both. “The price for every customer we get in contact with by having a loyalty setup is so much cheaper than paying for Google, Facebook, or Instagram,” says Guldager.

The business benefits from its loyalty program in one more way. The return rate for program members is roughly 40% less than for non-members—and fewer returns means higher profits.

An eye for the future

ONLY is excited to continue enhancing personalized in-store and online shopping experiences with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys. The company is eager to take advantage of other omnichannel features like endless aisle to save time and resources and meet its environmental goals. ONLY also sees Copilot as integral not only to its plans to further automate processes like bookkeeping and inventory tracking, but also to make shopping easier, more satisfying, and environmentally friendly. ONLY relies on Dynamics 365 to make the planet better and help us all look good while doing it.