Monica Vinader found Cyclr’s toolkit provided additional versatility to their working practices.

Company
Monica Vinader
Focus
Optimise customer experiences and their own operational processes
Sector
eCommerce

Monica Vinader is a global demi-fine jewellery brand. Established for over 12 years, they are a tech-enabled business with a strong online presence and retail stores operating globally from Singapore, the US and the UK.

They offer a full retail experience, across online and instore, which has led to rapid growth pushing new omni-channel experiences to their customers wherever they engage with them.

The importance of the online arm of the business led to it becoming their largest channel, due to the pandemic, fuelling their search to provide more advanced, high-touch experiences to their users.

Problem

Tackling abandonment emails

Monica Vinader initially had an issue around abandonment emails. Customers would browse their website, add an item to their basket, proceed to the checkout and then abandon without making a purchase.

To solve this problem they implemented and used a classic marketing automation system. It was a very off the shelf product where some JavaScript code was added to their website. However, Monica Vinader wanted to migrate away from a CDP marketing automation tool and return back to a more simplistic tech stack.

They needed to find a solution to help solve this use case; whether it was a separate vendor, who again would look after everything with JavaScript, build it themselves with their own development team, or see what is in the market in terms of toolkits for building flows to manage data pipelines.

Solution

Leveraging Cyclr to help exploit, speed up and save resources in projects

Monica Vinader leverages Cyclr to help them exploit, speed up and save resources in their projects. The abandonment flow was the first use case onboarded with Cyclr.

The team soon found the toolkit to be really useful for some of their other processes.

Now they use Cyclr in a variety of different ways. For instance, when they are building a new relationship with a paid media agency they need to share some of their customer data with them. They do an FTP transfer via an automated process with Cyclr.

Recently they started using Cyclr to send out WhatsApp communications to their customers. These provide notifications and updates on their orders.

Monica Vinader found using Cyclr cut a corner for them. They can now quickly create workflows, test and learn from a new flow experience for their customers. Without having to fight for the resources and big upfront investment to get the API integrations built.

Primarily the Monica Vinader data and product teams are interacting with Cyclr. There is an overlap because they have several individuals, who they call Utility Players, within commercial roles but are very data-driven and tech-enabled. They are not developers but have an appetite to quickly roll up their sleeves, and write a bit of code to try and solve a problem.

Those teams are using the Cyclr toolkit for their operational, analytic use cases.

Using Cyclr as a pseudo reverse ETL tool as a census or high touch. In that way they can trigger an email or WhatsApp for a customer based on their data, or when they exhibit certain behaviours.

Due to Monica Vinader being a seasonal business, for instance, due to Black Friday and Christmas gifting in November and December, the brand sees its website traffic increase by five to ten times.

From Cyclr’s perspective, it means receiving many more webhooks and running more workflows due to the increased traffic from their site.

When this seasonal scaling happens, Cyclr is able to respond and absorb the increase in demand for the infrastructure. As well as take a practical approach to helping the brand stay live, stay up to date and not introduce latency or lagging.

As a non-standard user of Cyclr, Monica Vinader found that there was a lot of patience from the Cyclr team during the presales process, being provided with proof of concepts and the drawing out of integration flows.

All of the questions they had they felt had been answered. During the onboarding process, Monica Vinader were able to upskill their team at the same time due to the new type of technology they were introduced to.

Results

Saving time and becoming more agile

Monica Vinader found that Cyclr’s toolkit provided additional versatility to their working practices. It opened up different avenues for them due to Cyclr being built as an embedded iPaaS, as well as a low-code solution. One of these avenues is the enablement of upskilling existing employees.

Before using Cyclr they relied on an external agency and didn’t necessarily have the right skill set in-house. Cyclr being a low-code solution was a good entry-level for keen individuals to directly create workflows and learn the likes of JavaScript to add more customisation. The toolkit has enabled Monica Vinader to upskill throughout the process, now individuals have learned and picked up the skills as they’ve gone.

The big benefit for Monica Vinader has been the saving of the opportunity cost. If they had built integrations themselves they would have lost valuable time.

Time is a finite resource and Cyclr has enabled them to do more with their existing developer resources.

They have achieved more by having the Cyclr toolkit at their fingertips enabling them to be more agile.

For instance, with setting up their abandonment email use case. When they were new to Cyclr it took about four weeks to get things up and running. Nowadays because of the familiarity with the tool they can create ready-to-deploy integrations within a week.

If Monica Vinader were to create integrations directly via their development agency, and developer resources, factoring in writing tickets and prioritisation, it would probably be four to six weeks.