A future-proof platform so retailers can deliver delight

ao.com is an electrical retailer operating in the UK and Germany. For the last 20 years, it has operated predominantly online. Delivering on AO’s ambition to exceed customer expectations and create delight requires constant effort and innovation.

Carl Phillips, Director of Technology at ao.com, says, “As we raise the bar for our customers, their expectations have gone even higher. Because we’ve grown so quickly, one of the challenges we face today is about how we are sure that our foundations continue to be stable enough and scalable enough for even more growth in the future.”

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Microsoft Dynamics 365 delivers agility

Choosing a cloud-based solution as the foundation for business operations was very important to ao.com as it sought to improve stability and scalability for the future.

Mark Higgins, Chief Financial Officer at ao.com, says, “We selected Microsoft Dynamics 365 as a product that would scale across our organisation.”

Gaining an holistic view of customers

Microsoft Dynamics 365 has quickly begun to deliver improved insights explains Yasmin Weaver, the Financial Controller at ao.com. “Our previous system was very difficult to extract any value-add information,” she explains. “Being able to understand, decipher and manipulate the data is absolutely key to what we do.”

Microsoft Dynamics is very user-friendly, she continues: “If you know Microsoft, you know how to use Dynamics 365.”

Phillips agrees. “What we get with Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a single view of inventory, a single view of customers,” he explains. “Through some of the advanced analytics and Power BI… [we gain] … the ability to make better and faster actionable decisions about how to trade.”

The ao.com team is excited about the new potential to create synergies across the business and continue to raise the bar for its customers.