• Offers new services for mobility and IoT-enabled devices

• Empowers employees to provide better customer service

• Increases sales and market share with effective omnichannel marketing

• Accelerates time to market while reducing IT development and testing time by 25%

"It used to be hard to gain the right insights to accurately measure our marketing spend and impacts," says Aleš. "With Google Analytics, we can better connect the omnichannel customer journey. User IDs and beacons reveal what customers searched for when they came to our store, as well as what they bought in the past."

Conrad is working with Google to optimize performance for its mobile sites and offer customers even better experiences. It’s also targeting mobile customers with Google local inventory ads, allowing them to reserve inventory for pickup. Using its brick-and-mortar stores as fulfillment hubs, Conrad offers two-hour product delivery to all major German cities. With services like Click & Collect or Reserve & Collect, B2B customers can choose from more than a million products instead of being limited to a single store’s inventory of approximately 35,000 items.

"Google helps us strengthen omnichannel marketing by creating a strong connection between the online and offline worlds," says Aleš. "We can offer customers the same huge array of choices they would have at a much larger store, and we get more value from our physical locations."

When Aleš joined the company, Conrad employees were using Lotus Notes along with 10 separate applications for communication and collaboration—a costly, inflexible approach that limited user productivity. Still, discussions about moving to the cloud were met with some internal resistance from employees who were concerned about the change.

"We compared Google Workspace to Office 365 and decided that Google Workspace made it easy for our users to get comfortable with the cloud," says Aleš. "Because employees view Google as an industry leader, moving to Google Workspace was met with celebration, especially among younger staff who intuitively understand the benefits. It also helps us more effectively collaborate with external companies."

Conrad moved all of its approximately 4,000 employees to Google Workspace in just four months. Now all employees have access to a productivity suite, whereas previously the company’s store and warehouse employees did not because legacy tools were too expensive and complicated for all employees to use. Google Workspace immediately increased the level of communication and information sharing across countries, giving all Conrad employees a voice.

Digitizing the lifecycle of each employee helped decrease paper usage in stores significantly and enable anytime, anywhere information access. It also improves data security, enabling the company to quickly delete data from Google Workspace or disable user accounts if mobile devices are lost. This is especially beneficial for employees visiting the company’s B2B customers or working in retail stores.

"With our internal data already in the cloud, we thought, why not pursue a cloud-first strategy and reap the cost savings, time savings, and security benefits?" says Aleš.

Conrad uses technology to make its retail stores more customer friendly, creating connections between touch screens, wall screens, and customers’ mobile phones. Using 800 Android mobile devices and 100 Google Chromebooks, sales clerks can find the right products for customers and use different omnichannel fulfillments. Conrad is also testing digital signage at retail stores, using Google Chrome Enterprise licensing for the most comprehensive feature set. It even sells Google Home voice-activated speakers to employees at high discounts so they can practice interacting with Google Assistant at home and show customers the true value of smart systems.

By improving internal communications and demonstrating authentic use cases for Smart Home technology, Conrad is improving customer experiences in its retail stores and increasing sales. "The ability to connect everything into one environment and combine collaboration, video, and digital signage opens up a lot of possibilities to our employees," says Aleš. "Smart products drive new technologies, and customers can see how the smart systems work when employees show them how they use it."

By creating a transparent and collaborative environment, Conrad encourages employees to share responsibility and take more ownership. As a result, they feel empowered to solve problems on their own. They also have more independence, albeit in a more controlled, secure environment.

'New deployments are happening daily or weekly now because people are not buried by bureaucracy or resource constraints," says Aleš. 'Business users can easily do trials and change how requirements are tested and defined. We can do long-term planning while accounting for other factors that may change quickly."

Employees are getting into the cloud mindset, aware of the new possibilities. For example, when the marketing department uploads a product photo, previously an employee wrote the copy and then manually translated it into different languages for the 12 countries where Conrad maintains a presence. Now, that process is fully automated from end to end, using Google Cloud Vision API and Google Cloud Translation API to analyze image content and then translate the descriptions.

"Google is helping us think about old processes in new ways and automate previously time-consuming tasks," says Aleš. "Change is happening, and we can embrace it instead of being held back by old ways of working."

In the coming years, Conrad will move more systems to the cloud and expand its online inventory to millions of products, many of them connected by IoT. The company also introduced a crowdsourcing platform called Conrad Friends that enables users to connect with tech-savvy people in their area. Users can contact Conrad Friends via voice commands using Google Assistant and Google Home to get help installing and configuring products that Conrad sells. Conrad is also exploring machine learning models for automated service and support chats using Google Dialogflow Enterprise Edition. With help from Apigee, a cross-cloud API platform, Conrad is enabling large B2B customers to seamlessly connect their procurement systems to Conrad’s product catalog, allowing Conrad to serve new types of customers.

"We want to offer a complete digital ordering and support ecosystem, establish an independent, brand-neutral IoT platform, and be the partner our customers turn to for help in implementing their technical ideas," adds Aleš. "By providing groundbreaking technology, Google is helping us get there."