XXXLutz drives rapid growth and competitive advantage delivering seamless omnichannel journeys

Rapid expansion of omnichannel shopping

XXXLutz is Europe’s second largest furniture retailer, striving to deliver flawless omnichannel experiences so customers have flexibility of how and where they buy. To support this strategy, the retailer established its digital branch several years ago, which has grown quickly and become a significant revenue contributor alongside its brick-and-mortar stores. XXXLutz is also focused on rapid expansion through brand acquisition. However, with so many brands now under the XXXLutz banner, the company has built up a complex and distributed technology ecosystem supporting front-end and back-end processes, including omni-channel customer journeys.

The applications underpinning XXXLutz’s omnichannel customer experiences span multiple platforms and a multicloud and Kubernetes architecture. Such a complex stack, coupled with the retailer’s rapid growth, created silos across the organization, where different teams managed different applications and types of infrastructure with disparate tools. This fragmented approach made it difficult to get end-to-end visibility of customer journeys or understand how the systems supporting them were interconnected. Without this insight, it was challenging to identify the root-cause of issues in customer journeys, which impacted conversions and put XXXLutz’s revenue and customer loyalty at risk.

Eliminating manual burden

XXXLutz needed a solution that offered observability across the entire technology stack, from its legacy on-premises infrastructure to its cloud platforms and the microservices layer. It needed a platform that could automatically consolidate monitoring data into a single view to eliminate the need for teams to manually stitch together multiple datasets, so they could find the root cause of issues instantly. After evaluating the market, XXXLutz selected Dynatrace as the solution that could best meet its needs.

“The biggest value in Dynatrace is the confidence it gives us in our data,” comments Tobias Sammereyer, Team Lead Performance Engineering at XXXL Digital. “With Dynatrace, we are working based on facts, not assumptions. As a result, we’re spending less time searching for the cause of issues, and instead getting on with working together to solve them. That’s critical, as if their journey doesn’t work the first time, customers most likely won’t come back, so we need to be proactive in problem handling.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Faster transactions: With business event data from Grail, XXXLutz can get an overview of the problems that impact customers during the order process, such as detecting multi-use of expired voucher codes, problems with payment providers, or issues with product availability. For example, Grail uncovered that one step in the checkout process took more than 10 seconds to complete, but a simple code fix could bring that down to just 3 seconds, helping to improve conversions. ​
• Better collaboration: Dynatrace has broken down silos between internal departments as well as third-party software providers by providing a holistic source of data-driven truth. Having a single intelligent dashboard rather than multiple tools reduces complexity to drive faster, data-driven decision making and innovation.
• Enhanced customer experiences: Before Dynatrace, XXXLutz had limited visibility into its multicloud environment and lacked understanding of how its applications were interconnected. Now, with Dynatrace’s automation and AIOps capabilities, teams can instantly identify the root-cause of an issue, and proactively optimize services before customers are impacted. This has led to better conversions and higher customer loyalty.
• Data-driven decision making: Business insights from Grail enable XXXLutz’s digital teams to understand exactly which areas of the technology stack to optimize to drive better revenues and conversions. This enables the retailer to make more impactful decisions that meet the business’ priorities.

“Dynatrace keeps us well informed about the health of our services, so we can make better decisions for our business and our customers,” continued Tobias. “With Grail, we can instantly understand how what happens in our technology stack relates to business outcomes, such as revenue and conversions. As we continue to develop innovative new services, Dynatrace will be key for ensuring we are always proactively monitoring and optimizing those services to offer our customers the best possible shopping experiences.”