Ste. Michelle Wine Estates crafts premium customer experiences with Dynamics 365 Commerce

Ste. Michelle Wine Estates views its more than 3,900 acres of vineyards as a “string of pearls,” where artisans use their local knowledge and experience to cultivate the luster and unique flavors of the wines they create. The result is a broad collection of wines that provide a premium experience for consumers with discerning palettes. Ste. Michelle wants that sense of experiencing something special to extend across all of its brands and imported labels to reach all customer touch points, from vineyard tasting rooms to the company’s wine clubs and e-commerce platform. 

Delivering on a promise of luxury requires consistent engagement with customers across all shopping channels. Ste. Michelle is using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce to marry the craftsmanship of its winemakers with the logistical requirements of high-profile national retail distribution.

What does it mean for us to have a commerce system that’s the best in its class? Our ambition—and the reason we launched this project in the first place—is to own and customize more of the consumer purchase journey with our products. From the moment a consumer visits one of our wineries or tasting rooms, joins one of our clubs, or decides to purchase products online, we want to remove all sources of friction that come between the consumer and the perfect wine choice. By owning that consumer relationship, we also create valuable opportunities to cross-sell and upsell within our great portfolio of products.

Take our tasting rooms, for example. If a club member comes in, and we know based on historical purchase data that they’ve always bought Cabernets, we probably don’t want to present them with a Riesling to taste. We want to greet them with their favorite Cabernet or perhaps introduce a new Cab that we’ve just released. But we faced the question of how to get to that point and really elevate the entire guest experience.

When we looked at all the different data that we had available about our consumers, it became clear to us that it was quite disjointed. We needed a platform that could bring all that information into one accessible place where we could easily draw out insights across all our different channels—physical tasting rooms, websites, email campaigns, social, paid media channels, the whole works.

We found our answer in Dynamics 365 Commerce. We used to have retail data in one place while club and e-commerce data sat in another database. This prevented us from making valuable connections between different points in customers’ purchase journeys. We now have a centralized repository where our data works together to provide a seamless experience for our guests along with better insight into our operations for those of us on the business side. Our CEO has been very clear over the last year about the need for us to digitally transform—making the consumer our focus—and this is an essential first step along that path.

What’s exciting about Dynamics 365 Commerce is that it opens up so many possibilities for us to extend the reach of our imagination about what a luxury consumer experience can be. Consumers increasingly expect mobility and customization, and now we’re in a position to deliver that. For example, as we roll out Commerce for each of our brands, we’re creating new websites that we optimize for mobile viewing. We tie those in with the rest of our platform’s functionality for a streamlined experience. With the new system being fully operational, consumers can easily use their smartphone to place an order for whatever they’re enjoying in one of our tasting rooms, and when they go to leave, we can have their wine waiting for them.

None of this would be possible if our technology deployment hadn’t gone smoothly, but so far it’s been superb. We went live with our first brand in Commerce on October 1, 2019, and by the end of January 2020, we plan to have all of our brands moved over. Considering that we made our platform decision in March 2019, we’ve been working on a pretty aggressive timeline, so we’re very satisfied with the speed of the migration and the support we’ve had from Microsoft along the way.

Because Commerce includes the development and management tools we need, it’s been much easier for us to implement a robust, end-to-end omnichannel retail system. Rather than choosing different products from different vendors and then having to build hard connectors between them, we have built-in seamless functionality across all our channels. This simplifies planning, deployment, and operations.

We’re still in the migration, so we haven’t yet realized the full value of our investment, but we anticipate significant business impact from Commerce, including increased average order value and increased order conversions. Using our new capabilities, we’re making ordering more seamless and personalized so that consumers enjoy purchasing our products, discovering new wines, and exploring features like our wine clubs, which we’ll be able to expand and develop further with additional customization and digital features.

There’s so much we can do with this solution to really start learning the behavior of our consumers—in a safe, nonintrusive way. Working behind the scenes, we can better understand individuals and how to create new, satisfying experiences for them.

We’re eager to continue our technology journey with Dynamics 365 Commerce and excited about the results we’ll see from expanding into new areas, like e-commerce. With that functionality, we’ll be able to take the wonderful experience that our guests have in our physical tasting rooms and bring that to the digital world. That will give us greater insight into consumer preferences so we can better tailor every touch point across websites and emails and deliver even more value to individuals.

This project positions us as a technology leader in our industry. And we believe it will benefit not just Ste. Michelle itself, but also our retailers. They face the same challenges we do when it comes to evolving consumer behavior patterns. With the information we glean from Commerce, we can advise them on how to best sell wine in this changing omnichannel landscape, where customers want to buy products on a mobile device and pick them up at a store. We’re also looking at ideas like pop-up stores in parts of the country where consumers can’t visit one of our facilities. Essentially, we now have the tools and insights we need to adapt to the market and roll out new experiences faster and more strategically than we could before.

We also expect this project to help us extend our reach and bring new customers into the Ste. Michelle family. The more first-party data we have about our existing consumers, the better job we can do through look-alike modeling and targeting to find new customers who fit the right patterns and try to get them to convert, whether it’s through a tasting room visit or an e-commerce purchase.

Because we’ve now got an integrated data system—as opposed to having point-of-sale and digital channels that don’t talk to each other—we’ll be able to identify active consumers beyond those listed in our current database and reach out to them in specific ways through our various contact points. So we can not only appeal to brand new customers better now, we can also deepen loyalty with existing consumers. Choosing Dynamics 365 is a win for everyone involved.

Find out more about Ste. Michelle Wine Estates on LinkedIn.