Case Study

Implementing Call Center capabilities for a leading Athleisure Retailer

Replace the existing Customer Service Center (CSC)-ATG platform and build all functionalities used by Guest Education Center (GEC) educators, Order Support and other teams with IBM Sterling Call Center(COM). COM to be integrated with the core Next-Generation Commerce (NGC) platform at the backend.

Founded

1998

Headquarters

Vancouver, BC

Industry

Retail

Number of Locations

655 (2023)

Founded

1998

Headquarters

Vancouver, BC

Industry

Retail

Number of Locations

655 (2023)

About LuluLemon

Lululemon Athletica Inc. is a Canadian based technical athletic apparel, footwear and accessories company for yoga, running, training, and most other activities, creating transformational products and experiences that build meaningful connections, unlocking greater possibility and wellbeing for all.

Setting the bar in innovation of fabrics and functional designs, Lululemon works with yogis and athletes in local communities around the world for continuous research and product feedback.

Business Challenge

Lululemon wanted to move away from their legacy Oracle based customer service platform to a platform that can deliver better outcomes for their guests(customers) and educators (CSRs). They looked for a solution compatible with their soon-to-launch modern headless Next-Generation eCommerce platform (NGC) and a services partner who could take on any ensuing integration work in a robust Abstraction layer architecture built on AWS.

They evaluated platforms to see if it met the needs of their North America and International educators as well as the various Support teams. Luluemon turned to Perfaware to demonstrate the IBM Call Center solution (COM) and subsequently lead the process of realizing their vision for a superior guest experience harnessing current and future GEC technology.

Perfaware Solution and Execution

For Create Order all calls to NGC Integration required cart token to be sent from COM UI. Extensive Customization done to store and retrieve Token from Cookies

Payment Confirmation screen customized to show a Refund Breakdown when creating Return

Developed and deployed 4 Microservices for Catalog, Return Shipping Label, Checkout and Profile services in the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) cluster and can be reached via the AWS API gateway authenticated using the AWS Cognito token. The API gateway is only accessible through AWS EC2 instances

Catalog microservice is a Spring boot based application used to retrieve product details. It runs behind AWS Egress Proxy API Gateway like other microservices, consumes SkuId and Locale value from the OMS client, and sends it to the NGC catalog service. Receives the response from NGC and sends the response back to the OMS client

Checkout microservice integrates with NGC’s APIGEE end points for the use cases based on the JSON request payload from COM/OMS. In COM/OMS, a service calls AWS Cognito to get the token which is used to call the API gateway which eventually calls the microservice with the request. The request is then transformed into a JSON format as per NGC API specification and receives the response and transforms the response and sends it back to the COM/OMS client.

Profile services microservice integrates with GIH’s APIGEE end points for the below use cases based on the JSON request payload from COM/OMS. In COM/OMS, a service calls AWS Cognito to get the token which is used to call the API gateway which eventually calls the microservice with the request. The request is then transformed into a JSON format as per GIH’s API specification and receives the response and transform the response and sends it back to the COM/OMS client.

Results

Over 700 users/guest educators migrated from the old ATG based call center solution to IBM Sterling COM. All GEC users were smoothly transitioned to COM for pre and post purchase guest support in a phased manner.

The educators have given fantastic feedback on the IBM COM solution applauding it for its more intuitive and user friendly interface whereby the user can have multiple orders open at once.

The management was thrilled to see that COM helps reduce time working on appeasements and that users can visualize the cost breakdowns of each item (tax, discount, etc) to deliver better customer experience.

The guest educators are finding it easy to organize and switch between the screens seamlessly further improving their productivity.

Feedback from Educators

VERY smooth in comparison to other launch days for digital educators

My team is feeling proud when they have been placing orders, enjoys it, thinks its intuitive

Just placed an almost $11,000 order for my FIRST order in com and no this was not a DBO

What I'm seeing from the chat is that all processes are running as they should be, and there are just some small, fixable glitches and learning bumps! So proud of this team!

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