Merkle partners with Mighty Craft to build a unique Salesforce-driven B2B2C solution that simplifies and improves the B2B customer experience and enables their portfolio of brands to grow their market share and engage with their Direct-to-Consumer customers to create meaningful relationships – online and offline.

About Mighty Craft

Mighty Craft is one of Australia's leading and fastest-growing premium craft drinks companies. With an unwavering love for craft brewing, Mighty Craft's sole purpose is to help the craft brewing industry prosper, allowing smaller craft brewers to scale their production and showcase their artisan products to the masses. 

Mighty Craft offers front and back-end support to the brands in their portfolio, connecting sales, marketing and venue (offline) channels that would typically only be available to large commercial businesses. 

Challenge

Mighty Craft used an "Assisted Ordering" process, facilitated through an eCommerce platform to fulfil customer orders. This process required 16 steps to be completed before an order could be successfully placed. The arduous process also had to take place whilst face-to-face  with  the customer, which was both inefficient and resulted in a sub-optimal customer experience. 

Mighty Craft has also made a significant investment into Netsuite - a leading ERP Provider, which allowed them to have much more control and visibility over customer orders and stock levels. However, the previous eCommerce system could not natively integrate with Netsuite and provide this information to the customer at the point of sale. 

Mighty Craft was keen to build a best-in-class B2B2C ordering platform that would deliver: 

Customer-first experience: Putting the customer at the heart of the platform's design and creating a genuinely intuitive and quick ordering experience.

Live data Capabilities: Allowing live promotional and stock data to be viewed in the single interface allowing for accurate fulfilment and costing projections.

360-degree view of the customer: Visibility over customer information and order history, breaking down silos and allowing for a more data-driven sales process.

Access on-the-go, anytime: Ability for customers and sales representatives alike to access the platform on desktop and mobile devices with 24/7 accessibility.

Lightning-fast eCommerce portal set up: Allowing the creation of a fully functioning eCommerce site for each brand in the portfolio. 

Integrated into back-end systems: Working smoothly with logistics, billing and finance. 

Direct-2-Consumer solution that integrates all the 10 brand sales orders and D2C customer data into Salesforce and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement for order capturing, single view of the customer, including engagement programs and lead capturing and nurturing.

Solution

After an extensive search of the marketplace, Mighty Craft partnered with Salesforce and Merkle to deliver their transformation project. 

Anton Heyns - Head of Technology at Mighty Craft explains, "Creating a connected customer experience was central to our transformation strategy. Salesforce was ultimately the only choice that we could trust to address a “whole of business” mindset, covering the requirements of the business across all functions whilst also being able to scale easily. We chose Merkle as our implementation partner due to their previous experience and ability to work with us in an agile way to meet the tight deadlines of the project". 

Due to the seasonal nature of Mighty Craft's business, the lead up to Christmas has higher order volumes. The team at Merkle were tasked with delivering the project in only four months. Merkle worked with Mighty Craft to develop an agile plan, ramping up resources into sprints where needed.

"We have enjoyed working with Merkle. During the project, Merkle became an extension of our team, we're able to understand our needs and ultimately were able to deliver an amazing outcome in a short space of time" - Richard Marques - Enterprise Enablement Manager, Mighty Craft

Results

The powerful new capabilities of the platform have enabled Mighty Craft to improve the end-customer experience significantly by:

• Creating a single view of the customer - All teams across the business have access to up-to-date customer data, breaking down silos and the need to check multiple systems.
• Providing a streamlined customer experience - Field reps spend less time entering data and more time having quality conversations with customers. Stock levels are available live, allowing reps to suggest alternative product lines when needed. 
• Allowing portfolio brands to create and manage promotions easily - Brands have a single place to manage promotions across their product portfolio. 
• Ecommerce at scale - Merkle has built scalable technology that has reduced the time it takes for a brand to create a customer-facing eCommerce portal from weeks to days. 
• Customer Engagement – Merkle has implemented Mighty Craft’s Account Engagement (Pardot) supporting customer engagement, lead capturing, and nurturing for all the portfolio brands’ customers on a brand level.
• Custom functionality – the capability to deploy custom functionality rapidly has enabled the business to close functional gaps, also ensuring an appropriate level of governance. The ability to control and have visibility on free stock was one example of this which Mighty Craft were able to implement in five days due to the flexibility and open-architecture of the system and Merkle’s knowledge of our business. The benefit and value back to the business has been immense.    

The business case was premised on process automation and optimisation leading to a reduction in required resources. The implementation of the solution led to  efficiencies of fifty percent in the order management administration function through the technologies that were deployed.  

"Our Salesforce solution is working brilliantly for our business. I would go as far as to say that it's world-class. The capabilities of the platform will allow us to scale the business and retain a long-term technology stack." - Richard Marques - Enterprise Enablement Manager, Mighty Craft