High-Tech and Personal: Electronics Retailer Dixons Carphone and Adobe Experience Manager

As one of the largest electronics retailers in the whole of Europe, Dixons Carphone operates around 900 stores across the continent

With such a complex setup of stores, customer bases, and specific logistics related to geography, Dixons Carphone stays on top by bringing a personalized touch online using an Adobe suite of digital solutions: Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Target, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Experience Cloud.

In putting the customer first, Dixons tries to dig a deeper understanding of their customers and which electronic products and services they are wanting. They also sell products and services across its different brands such as Currys and PCWorld.

Dixons Carphone has a history of success in its stores as it cultivated a space for customers to try out the latest models and talk to staff before deciding on whether to buy or not. However, like other retailers, Dixons has been shifting much more towards ecommerce, so it was vital to provide their customers as similar as possible an experience as their store.

“We’re not only competing against traditional brick-and-mortar stores, but also digital retailers,” said Harry Sohal, product owner, Adobe Experience Manager, for Carphone Warehouse. “Customers expect a VIP experience where we can blow their minds with compelling offers, in-depth product information, and very personal engagement. We’re not just looking to make the sale once. We want to delight people at every moment and turn them into loyal, lifelong customers.”

That means providing customers personalized experiences. And so finding a digital platform that is capable of enhancing its online presence became the priority.

At the time it’s website was quite static and became dependent on developers to write code. Also, it wanted to improve the agility of its website so that it could quickly respond to market changes and customer behavior. It wanted the ability to update and publish content without the need of developers. And it wanted to improve its sales through providing personalized digital experiences.

That’s why Dixons chose to adopt Adobe Experience Cloud.

“Adobe Experience Cloud is one of the most seamless digital experience platforms available,” said Harry. “Adobe understands what users want to do and creates paths for information to flow between solutions. The result is an innovative digital platform that allows us to create an exceptional end-to-end digital journey for our customers.”

Using reusable components via Adobe Experience Manager their team is able to create whole new campaigns, build dynamic landing pages, and make updates to content to copy quickly.

Designers as well as developers can build customizable components and images that the merchandising team can easily drag into a template, boosting the usability of content elements without the need of continual technical skills being needed.

In the past, creating sales used to take around 7 days; but now with Adobe Experience Manager, the same types of sales now take less than a day.

“The merchandising team can make changes 10 times faster with Adobe Experience Manager,” noted Harry. “We’re also achieving 500% faster time to market for new campaigns. This agility allows us to react to market changes before our competition and establish ourselves as leaders in the retail market.”

Freeing devs to get creative

With AEM’s reusable components, Dixons’ developers saved a huge amount of time on doing the same tasks as pre-Adobe: they saved 400 hours over a span of 6 months. In addition, they cut back on testing time by 50%. 

That’s a lot of time saved. And that’s a lot of creative time that devs can spend on making new features or enhancing the general digital experience.

“On the old website,” added Harry, “we had to limit the number of pages that we created because it took too much time to update information across pages… With Adobe Experience Manager, we have the freedom to create more pages that highlight information more prominently to consumers. The ability to connect consumers with vital information more effectively has improved our SEO rating, increased traffic to the website, and increased conversions.”

The suite

Dixons Carphone connects AEM with other Adobe products like Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target. The former gathers real-time metrics that help Dixons understand how their customers are responding to the changes in the website. While the latter takes the data and is used to optimize the digital experience.

Using Adobe Target, banners can be tested quickly, as well as page layouts and CTAs. And its integration with Adobe Experience Manager means that building test options can be quickened. Target is used to… well… target audiences using personalized content, products, or offers. So for example, rather than showing the same offer on a phone to all customers, Target can be used to segment specific offers, like offering deals on headphones to younger people and smart home tech for older customers. This is actually what Dixons did, and they saw their conversion rate hit 17%.

Then there was Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s answer to Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s Einstein artificial intelligence tech.

“Adobe Sensei will be critical to us in taking the next step in personalization across touchpoints,” said Harry. “We can utilize artificial intelligence to reach out to more customers in a personal way by removing the manual task of creating audiences and matching them with top experiences.”

Looking to the future, Dixons Carphone is thinking about doubling down on Adobe products. “Adobe is a fantastic partner in our digital transformation,” added Harry. “Adobe not only enables us to get the most from solutions that work for us today, they push us to imagine where we want to be in the future and they give us the knowledge and technology that we need to reach our goals.

“Together with Adobe, we’re developing a robust digital platform that we can use to build highly competitive experiences for our customers across touchpoints.”

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Adobe Experience Manager dev shops. Contact us to see how we can work together.