Revolution Beauty gives its eCommerce operations a digital makeover

Challenge

Adapting eCommerce to fast-fashion beauty experiences

Founded in 2014, Revolution Beauty is one of the fastest growing beauty brands in the UK. Speed to market and creating high-quality products at affordable prices has always been critical to Revolution Beauty’s success. With online shopping increasing, Revolution Beauty needed to deliver new, engaging eCommerce experiences fast.

But their website could not keep up with the brand’s pace of continuous innovation and new product releases. It was difficult and time-consuming to update and add pricing, images, product descriptions, and other critical information.

To maintain market leadership, Revolution Beauty also needed to integrate its eCommerce platform with on-premises applications for a single customer view — enabling customer service reps to resolve inquiries faster and deliver a seamless customer experience.

Objectives

Creating great customer experiences on a future-proof foundation

Revolution Beauty wanted to build better digital customer experiences and increase innovation by:

• Automating the product launch process to deliver new products to consumers faster and reduce reliance on external partners
• Creating a single view of the customer and improving online experiences by connecting Salesforce Commerce Cloud to back-end systems
• Delivering new features and capabilities quickly, such as an interactive loyalty platform to drive customer engagement 

Solution

Delivering a connected customer experience with API integration

Revolution Beauty had already selected Salesforce Commerce Cloud as its new eCommerce platform. But to launch projects faster, Revolution Beauty needed a flexible integration layer to connect the new eCommerce platform with its on-premises systems. Revolution Beauty’s technology partner — Astound Commerce — a leading digital agency and systems integrator, recommended MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform™ due to the platform’s ease-of-use and API integration capabilities.

By selecting MuleSoft to take an API integration approach, Revolution Beauty connected Salesforce Commerce Cloud to its core backend systems — including its ERP, Netsuite, contact center platform, Robin HQ, and an asset management tool called Image Relay. In just five months, Revolution Beauty transformed its eCommerce and customer service experience, resulting in a 4X increase in web traffic, a considerable increase in online customer satisfaction, and a 15% reduction in shopping cart abandonment.

Automating new product launches

To start, Revolution Beauty set out to accelerate time to launch new products online. On average, the company launches 30 new SKUs each week, with a minimum of three image types per SKU. This focus on speed to market puts immense pressure on the Creative and Web teams to add hundreds of new products images to the website each month.

Previously, teams had to manually upload each image from Revolution Beauty’s asset management tool — Image Relay — to Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This manual process involved creative staff manually reviewing and sending images to the eCommerce team to upload to the site, whereas, with the Image Relay integration, the images are automatically uploaded to the site once approved in the asset management platform.

By using API integration to unlock and connect key systems, data, and applications with APIs, Revolution Beauty has drastically reduced the number of custom code integrations and decreased maintenance costs. With less overhead, the company can spend more time and resources on innovation — giving it the flexibility to respond quickly to market needs.

Revolution Beauty used MuleSoft to build APIs that integrate Image Relay to Salesforce Commerce Cloud — automating the image uploading process. This ensures that product images are assigned to the correct SKU, in the correct order. Removing this manual task has boosted productivity between the creative and merchandising teams, reducing operational costs and enabling Revolution Beauty to build its brand presence.

Answering customer queries faster with a reusable Contact Center API

Next, the Revolution Beauty team built an API to unlock and integrate siloed data across its ERP system, contact center platform, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. With this API-led integration, Revolution Beauty is now able to have a single view of the customer — enabling global contact center representatives to open a customer ticket and instantly see all of the relevant data and history.

This integration ensures that teams can access accurate customer data for Revolution Beauty’s UK, US and International sites. Representatives on the global customer service team are now more productive, resolving 60% more customer queries than before, providing a more consistent response to customer queries and driving seamless online experiences.

“Building reusable APIs with MuleSoft for our contact center platform has allowed us to get a 360-degree view of our customers. This has been critical in allowing us to deliver improved, frictionless customer experiences that drive loyalty and keep customers coming back again and again,” said Steve Griffiths, Head of Digital Development, Revolution Beauty.

Results

Accelerating new digital initiatives

Revolution Beauty now has the flexibility needed to launch new digital projects and continually enhance eCommerce experiences. Revolution Beauty’s digital team has been able to deliver on average two new digital initiatives each month — including launching its interactive loyalty platform, which allows customers to earn points through referring friends, following the brand on social media, and leaving reviews.

“It’s great having that flexibility in-house; even as a small team we can implement changes and add new features and functionality very quickly,” said Griffiths.

Revolution Beauty’s flexibility has been key in helping the business pivot in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to March 2020, 80% of the brand’s business was through brick-and-mortar stores. However, thanks to having a scalable and resilient API integration platform, Revolution Beauty has been able to easily meet a 300-400% growth in eCommerce volumes since the start of the pandemic.

“We’ll chop and change things over the next few years, but we’re not tied into any one system anymore. We now have the platform to really start to grow and implement new, innovative services,” concluded Griffiths.