The data-driven marketing automation solution adapts to bofrost* customers’ needs.
Like many businesses, bofrost*, a leader in frozen food products in Europe, needed to adapt to the many challenges COVID-19 created. For bofrost*, this meant responding to its customers’ increased demand for online shopping. To address this change, bofrost* started shipping frozen and fresh produce directly to consumers’ homes.
However, now that the world is opening up and settling into a new normal, it is unclear which new consumer behaviors will persist going forward. In June, bofrost* began working with IBM to answer this question. What will customer relations look like going forward? And will bofrost* need to revise its business processes and models for the new normal?
The first step was to analyze how COVID-19 transformed customer relationships during the pandemic. bofrost* also wanted to understand how its current operational model was performing in a situation that placed a high level of stress on operational activities. With this analysis, bofrost* could define the evolution of its sales and service model and leverage organizational paradigms to support the organization.
The result was a new e-commerce and marketing solution that is an automated, scalable cloud-based solution built with IBM and Salesforce technologies. The implementation leverages IBM’s hybrid cloud software to anticipate the changing needs of customers.
This new solution is designed to support fluctuations in online sales while offering customers a consistent and personalized experience across web and mobile devices. Supporting fluctuating online sales with AI addresses the challenges that were identified by analyzing consumer behavior in 2020.
In 2020 bofrost* saw a spike in online sales compared to previous years. It had 10 times the growth in online sales compared to the previous year, which was already growing. The new scalable cloud-based solution can now respond to such dramatic increases in sales.
“The COVID-19 pandemic seriously disrupted the way we did things,” explained Gianluca Tesolin, the CEO of bofrost* Italia. “But with IBM we were able to rethink our strategy and invest in new AI and hybrid cloud capabilities to meet changing consumer expectations now and for the future.”
The new technology has helped transform bofrost* into a more customer-centric company and allowed it to extend the same high-level client-centric approach that its face-to-face sales teams were already delivering to online clients. The data analysis has also given bofrost* a 360-degree view of customer behavior, which will help the company anticipate future needs.
“The challenge with bofrost* was to work alongside them in both the design of the new model and its implementation, leveraging technology and professional expertise to understand consumer needs and offer innovative solutions that could meet them,” said Rolando Neiger, GM, IBM Global Business Services. “To do so, we used the best experiential methodologies such as design thinking and empathy maps. We are proud to work with a company like bofrost* that is strongly committed to its customers and shares a deep innovative spirit.”
