Refined customer experiences

Elevating Luxury Retail with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CRM)

Vision and objectives

Leading Canadian retailer Birks are renowned for their fine jewellery, timepieces, and gift collections. With 22 Maison Birks stores across the country and an eCommerce site boasting the largest online hard luxury assortment, their clientele is accustomed to premium products and superior service. However, their CRM was not providing brand ambassadors the accurate, up-to-date data and insights to go above and beyond with highly personalized service and offerings. Transforming their in-store experience for both customers and employees being pivotal to their digital transformation, Birks approached Thinkmax to develop a tailored Customer Engagement solution leveraging their Microsoft D365 business applications.

The mandate

Thinkmax was brought in because of our expertise in leveraging the Microsoft Dynamics 365 framework and ability to decouple it to build their customized Customer Engagement solution
to replace their legacy CRM. Birks’ requirements called for a partner with the industry, technology, and product experience to leverage their existing D365 framework, decouple it, and build an advanced (luxury jewelry and products) Customer Preference Center solution built on:

• Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Apps
• Power Apps Model Driven App
• Power Automate
• Power BI

Business and technology challenges

Within the luxury jewelry and novelty timepiece industry, aligning customer demands with the high demand of limited production of novelty items, presented a challenge to Birks’ business operations. To overcome this and uphold the renowned quality standards associated with the Birks brand, they needed to optimize processes and ensure efficiencies at the core. Their existing system had many limitations, proving to be time-consuming for employees to find, update, and maintain data. A significant amount of time that was being taken away from valuable customers interactions. Additionally, the system fell short in meeting data security and privacy requirements. Ensuring the confidentiality and protection of customer data and instilling best practices is critical to brand trust and of utmost importance to Birks. Free-form data within the legacy system also presented a tremendous challenge, creating inconsistencies that made harnessing the value of the data and extracting meaningful insights almost impossible.

Outcomes and immediate benefits

Implementation of a Luxury Jewelry & Products Preference Center, which includes a comprehensive catalog of luxury jewellery and products. This allows Birks to review various product variants and cater to specific customer preferences.

• 5,000+ New customers
• 10,700 New brand models (product catalog enrichment)
• +130% Increase in user adoption

Methodology and collaboration

When Birks approached Thinkmax, our extensive knowledge of their Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CRM) solution made it easy to design a tailored solution on Azure cloud leveraging Microsoft Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI. The Thinkmax approach enabled Birks to streamline processes, unify data and strengthen data security at the core of the business, then bring innovation to the edge by empowering them to leverage that data to personalize service and tailor offers.