GrandVision’s omnichannel customer experience transformation

The reason GrandVision started this transformation,

and I won’t call it a digital transformation,

I call it a customer experience transformation,

because we saw this as a tremendous opportunity to delight our customers and drive business value and growth.

My name is Kunal, Kunal Mukherjee-Chakraborty.

I'm currently the global vice president and chief customer experience and digital officer at GrandVision.

We provide eyewear products to millions of customers worldwide and also eyecare services.

We really help our customers to see better. And actually that's our motto.

“Eye care. We care more.”

We researched a lot to understand our consumer needs

and we spotted four key trends,

which were relevant for us

Over 50% of our customers research online before they actually visit our stores.

This is a very compelling realization that our digital channels are fast becoming the window for our physical stores.

The second trend was “24/7, always on”,

and we have seen, in certain countries, a surge in e-commerce orders around 9PM, 10PM.

The trend number three was impatience or, I would say, instant gratification.

And last but not the least, ‘Let me be me’.

Every person is an individual and we wanted to make sure that we provide him or her

the right product and services based on his or her preferences and needs.

We understand that if you want to solve these consumer pain points and really delight them at a mass scale,

then we have to build some flexible platforms and solutions.

We built a global Omni channel e-commerce platform.

We realized that building platforms is great, but it's also important to have the certain skills and capabilities.

We use an analogy, “a great racing car needs a great racing driver”.

So we created a global center of excellence

which is for digital performance marketing and digital operations and e-commerce.

When me and my team started talking to Google for a global partnership to make sure we have the right economy of scale and skill,

I think that's where the conversation started.

I have almost like a five step view of this transformation.

The five steps being tech platforms, data and analytics, digital performance marketing, paid media and content.

Our retail banners and their online e-commerce revenue increased by 66% in the first half of the year, 2021.

If you look at our other very important metric, which is digitally influenced store sales,

we continued the positive trend by increasing it by plus 122%.

We’re investing in some critical data platforms.

We're investing in some really key talents and data engineering and data science,

bringing in really smart people to help us to really provide personalized services and products to our customers

and this is really exciting for us going forward.