Head of Technology, Customer Experience Management
The challenge
Musti Group is one of the most customer-centric companies in its field. The company has had high growth ambitions for many years and it has also acquired several other pet goods retailers and petcare companies in Finland and Sweden in recent years. However, strong growth also led to the need to modernize but also rationalize their customer domain IT architecture and introduce totally new digital capabilities and experiences.
In 2019 Musti Group initiated a strategic development program to take their customer engagement and experience to the highest level. The target was to offer and enable a frictionless, rewarding, and personalized customer service and shopping experience to its loyal customers in all touch points globally, including all brick-and-mortar and online stores, its contact center, and its chat, mobile, and social media channels. Therefore, Musti Group also needed to design a longer-term and solid customer architecture vision and target architecture to support the program initiative. It was also crucial to plan and create a multi-phased architecture roadmap that was fully aligned with its very fast-paced customer engagement business roadmap.
Since the ambition and scope of the customer engagement program and architecture covered the whole customer domain including marketing, sales, customer service, store operations, e-commerce, and data analytics, Musti Group approached Tietoevry’s CX technology and architecture advisory team for help and guidance.
"We have been growing fast over the past years and customer-centricity has been one of our key cornerstones throughout our journey to become the leading petcare company in the Nordics. To be able to continue this journey, we need to create a clear target architecture and roadmap for the whole customer domain. To be successful we need to provide a solid target state and pragmatic roadmap to cover all customer-facing solutions and capabilities. We also need to make sure our new architecture is able to scale and respond to our very ambitious goals in customer engagement across the Musti ecosystem to serve pets and pet parents even better in the coming years."
Panu Hannula, CIO, Musti Group
The solution
Tietoevry’s CX technology and architecture advisory team conducted an eight-week collaborative and iterative CX architecture and roadmap consulting project. In the beginning, the team interviewed subject-matter experts and key IT stakeholders from Musti Group in order to capture a holistic understanding of the current IT landscape and architecture as well as overall IT strategy and other ongoing development initiatives.
After the current-state discovery, the team worked together with Musti Group’s CIO, Chief Customer Officer (CCO), and Remotion - a consultancy firm in personalization - to discover and define business goals, epics, and related architectural requirements in the short and long term. Within two weeks, the team workshopped and defined three logical solution architecture scenarios with pros and cons, and decided with Musti Group to proceed with one scenario to more detailed target-state design and roadmap planning. The chosen scenario was based on a so-called best-of-breed architecture scenario and relied heavily on the implementation of a customer data platform (CDP) as the brains of customer intelligence and engagement, complementing, for example, the existing CRM, e-commerce, and data platform solutions.
The team detailed the target and intermediary solution and integration architectures in parallel with the new customer engagement business blueprint owned by Musti Group’s CCO and ensured they were fully aligned. Tietoevry’s CX advisory team also screened and assessed viable commercial CDP vendors in order to validate the implementability of the target and intermediary architecture designs and to accelerate the customer engagement and experience program implementation.
At the end the team also defined a so-called executive architecture diagram that captured all essential existing and new capabilities needed within the customer domain architecture at a high level. The purpose of the executive diagram was to help communicate and discuss the very ambitious architecture plan within the Musti Group management.
"We asked Tietoevry CX for help since they have a vast but also deep understanding of customer engagement and experience trends, architectures, and technologies covering marketing automation, CRM, e-commerce, customer service, and digital services, etc. I’m very happy that we now have a very clear vision, blueprint, and roadmap to give us clear guidance and focus."
Panu Hannula, CIO, Musti Group
The result
Winning customer experience
Musti Group started to implement the new customer engagement and experience initiative in late 2019. A well-defined customer domain target architecture, roadmap, and blueprint brought very clear focus and guidance to parallel development projects involving several solution and consulting partners too. In particular, it crystallized the roles of different customer-facing tools and solutions, including customer relationship management (CRM) which was very helpful. At the end of 2020, Musti Group received an award for the best customer experience amongst omnichannel companies in Finland, which also indicated that Musti Group was on the right path.
“We wanted to make sure that our technology setup would be reliable, future-proof, and scalable, but would still enable us to move forward fast. Tietoevry CX helped us to understand which direction to take by bringing their expertise on evaluating the architecture, current market trends, and their suitability into our landscape. Tietoevry CX really helped us to make sure that we were making the right decisions in a renewal that impacted heavily on the essential components in our customer architecture. The project guided the direction and was then followed up by multiple technology projects. We renewed the key customer architecture elements and built new capabilities with modern, cloud-based platforms, microservices, and software.”
Marjaana Putro, Head of Data and Customer Solutions, Musti Group
The customer
Musti Group is a leading Nordic petcare company that operates an omnichannel business model to cater to the needs of pets and their owners across Finland, Sweden, and Norway. Musti Group offers a wide, curated assortment of pet products in both food and non-food categories and has a broad range of its own exclusive brands as well as third-party brands. Musti Group also provides services such as grooming, training, and veterinary services in selected locations across the Nordic countries.
Musti Group’s concept has a strong customer focus and is built around trust and the expert advice offered by Musti Group’s store personnel. The company has a popular loyalty club, through which members receive targeted communication and special offers as well as gain access to their dedicated online account.
Read more about our customer experience services and other customer stories.