Royal Ahrend powers 125 years of business on Commerce Cloud

Digital transformation from home

Founded in 1896, Royal Ahrend is an international leader in commercial furniture, delivering highly collaborative and sustainable office, learning, healthcare and retail environments to end users around the world. The organization’s furniture and space solutions are designed to encourage wellbeing and productivity. Royal Ahrend operates in more than 20 countries, including China, Russia and Dubai, through a portfolio of four well recognized brands: Ahrend, Gispen, Presikhaaf and Techo.

With COVID-19 changing the way people work across the world, Ahrend noticed new demands from its customers and needed to change its products and services quickly to adapt to the new reality.

One of the new services Ahrend has started to offer is its ‘working from home’ product, designed for employees to pick their own home office furniture bought by their employer. The website authorizes them to pick what they require and the order is then sent to their home address. Ahrend provides all the communication, production and delivery of the goods, in a user-friendly, personalized and secure way.

The organization also worked hard to identify and design customer journeys by creating focus groups with its own customer journeys measuring customer data within certain digital touchpoints. This was done for both the traditional customer journeys (B2B) as well as the new (B2C) and retail journeys. 

When all of the customer journeys had been designed Ahrend needed the proper infrastructure and platform to grow and realise the benefits of such a solution.

Being an Optimizely customer since 2012, it was an easy decision to build a new solution with both Optimizeley Content Cloud and Optimizely Commerce Cloud, these products were integrated onto a multi-brand platform servicing all customer groups in one. Ahrend also implemented Salesforce as its CRM and is now integrating all its systems into one seamless customer experience. The solution provided a new way of doing business with its customers.

A customer-specific web-shop with selected products or setups for working from home solutions was set up , next Ahrend integrated the customer’s HR system with a single sign-on that gives employees access to their employer’s catalogue without any account being needed other than the one they already use. Here, the customer can order from the selected catalogue and have the products delivered to their homes.

Running on the Optimizely DXP platform was a huge advantage, being compliant and secure towards its customers as part of the solution and service.

Ahrend has become a truly data-driven company over the past few years where tracking results and using analytics has become an important part of the business. Ahrend measures conversion, satisfaction and key touchpoints within each customer journey and uses these numbers to provide a better service and tweak the proposition for each customer. Ahrend also measures different ways of providing the service which gives good indications which customer journey, or part it, works best and then adapts to the relevant services both online and offline.

The next steps for Ahrend are now to integrate all its systems into one seamless customer experience, resulting in an even more data driven business and extending this on both online and offline channels.

__________________