MECCA was founded in 1997 to demystify beauty and help its community look, feel, and be their best. MECCA has since become Australia’s largest prestige beauty retailer, offering an exclusive curation of over 200 brands and a high-touch customer experience.
Connect online and in-store experience and personalise every touch point
MECCA has a loyal and engaged customer base that expects a really personalised experience. One of MECCA’s goals in transforming has been to better harness customer data to tailor each interaction, whether it’s an email, a conversation with the Customer Care team, or a visit to the store or website. First, MECCA needed to unify siloed systems and data to connect the online and in-store experience.
Salesforce is helping MECCA to create and activate its 360-degree view of the customer to deliver more personalised and meaningful experiences. Connecting systems and data and supporting headless ecommerce, Salesforce also helps MECCA innovate at pace to bring the art of its in-store service to the digital world.
Unifies systems and data for a connected customer experience
MECCA is on its way to establishing a 360-degree view of its customers, allowing teams to recognise customers at any point in their journey and cater to their individual needs and preferences.
MuleSoft has helped make this possible by unifying online and in-store records and providing the building blocks for more connected customer experiences. For example, MECCA has used the API management platform to develop 30 - 40 reusable APIs which help to speed up development.
MuleSoft has also enabled integration of other previously siloed systems to facilitate near real-time updates of inventory to Salesforce Commerce Cloud and pricing and product details to Salesforce Service Cloud. In the past, these updates took up to 24 hours.
Elevates online experience
Bringing the art of MECCA’s in-store service to the digital world is key to MECCA’s omnichannel strategy, and means continually elevating the online experience and inspiring customers with features like personalised product recommendations. Moving to headless commerce with Commerce Cloud supports this continual innovation by separating the front-end and back-end of MECCA’s ecommerce platform, making it easier to customise. In addition, any changes made to the back-end can be easily applied to both the website and mobile app to ensure a consistent experience.
“With a flexible headless architecture, our team can deliver at pace with agility. It has also successfully laid out the foundations to create a truly integrated and personalised experience for our customers,” said Elena Little, General Manager of Omnichannel Product and Experience for MECCA.
Deepens engagement and loyalty
MECCA uses Marketing Cloud in tandem with Commerce Cloud to improve engagement across all its digital touchpoints. At the same time, MECCA has evolved its marketing to be less channel-focused and more journey-focused. End-to-end journeys are designed around customer needs and cut across different channels. Marketing Cloud helps the team to build and refine these journeys based on information like churn risk and propensity to repurchase.
“We recognise that customer journeys are not linear. They cut across many different channels and for any given customer, no one journey is the same as another,” said Elena Little, General Manager of Omnichannel Product and Experience, MECCA
With Marketing Cloud Personalisation, MECCA has served up millions of personalised and tailored experiences to customers across its website, emails, and mobile app. It’s a perfect fit for MECCA’s culture of testing to learn, ensuring what and how it personalises gives customers its most valuable content, anticipates their needs, and nudges them in helpful ways in response to their behavioural signals.
All these initiatives have helped increase the percentage of omni-shoppers from around 12% of MECCA’s customer base to more than 30% over three years.
Loyalty Management from Salesforce will centralise program management for MECCA and use online and in-store transaction data to calculate member levels.
“Our vision for Beauty Loop has always been to reward and surprise our loyal customers with the most amazing experiences and products. Implementing Loyalty Management means we now have the strong foundations for our plans for the future so that we can remain as Australia's favourite loyalty program,” said Rosie McFarlane, Head of Loyalty, MECCA.
Salesforce supports our vision to build connected and seamless journeys across all touch points, so whenever you interact with MECCA you get a consistent experience.
Elena LittleGeneral Manager of Omnichannel Product and Experience, MECCA
Enhances service experience for customers and employees
As part of MECCA’s digital transformation, it went through a discovery process to understand customers’ pain points. One of those pain points is that customers demanded more personal service. For example, if a MECCA Beauty Loop member called up, they expected MECCA to know who they were and make them feel valued.
Service Cloud has made it easier to provide this level of service by empowering the customer care team with all the tools and information they need in one place. It has also positioned MECCA for a new era of success where humans and agents drive customer success together. Harnessing the power of AI will help MECCA continue to recognise and intelligently serve customers’ needs and wants, which in turn will drive efficiencies and create even more capacity to serve customers.
Customer care specialists now use Service Cloud to manage enquiries received by email and Live Chat. MECCA has also introduced Miss MECCA, a chatbot powered by Einstein Bots which is there to support customers 24/7. Miss MECCA automatically raises a case for more complex issues. This gives customer care specialists more time to handle the rest in real-time, resulting in a reduction in chat abandonment rates.
Service Cloud Voice has improved service further by consolidating the Customer Care team’s phone systems.
Turns data into actionable insights
With Tableau, MECCA visualises and understands behaviour across the customer lifecycle and validates product preferences. MECCA can better understand their most loyal customers and repurchasing rates of their favourite products, informing decisions to drive growth and retention.
With more in-depth cross-shop and customer analysis, MECCA can also better understand behaviours like product switching, helping it mitigate the risk of cannibalisation when introducing new brands and products.
Tableau additionally supports individual store operations, informing tasks like rostering and helping teams predict and prevent out-of-stock events.
Partnering for customer success
To help drive its transformation, MECCA partnered with Salesforce Professional Services and Deloitte Digital. Each partner has brought differing perspectives, experiences, and knowledge of international best practices, which has helped shape MECCA’s roadmap.
Salesforce and Deloitte Digital have also helped to accelerate MECCA’s transformation journey with the initial rollout of Salesforce in 2021 taking just 12 weeks.
MECCA now works with Signature Success to maximise the value of Salesforce and ensure peak performance. With consulting and services such as proactive monitoring, Signature Success helped MECCA go live with its rearchitected ecommerce platform and seamlessly support increased traffic during Cyber Monday and Boxing Day.
Signature Success and Professional Services also worked together to support the successful launch of Loyalty Management.
One of the great successes of these initiatives and MECCA’s overall transformation has been keeping its customers at the centre of everything it does. It's now continuing to amplify that to serve customers better and provide them with products and experiences relevant to their needs.
