As car brand smart was about to relaunch their electric vehicles they had a vision—one that disrupted traditional auto sales—a direct sales model that unified online and offline experiences and reflected the circuitous way people make purchases.
To do this it needed a marketing platform that offered a true end-to-end digital customer experience as well as the data capabilities to fuel future growth and innovation. With Accenture as its partner, smart took this innovation from idea to launch in 2.5 years—a fraction of the usual time.
Within 24 hours of launching the platform in Germany, an entire line of cars sold out.
Commerce is at the core of the new, built from scratch platform for selling cars. It features advanced customizations, multi-medium customer service and connections to offline experiences such as test drives. Users can trigger a purchase at any point and complete it entirely online, resulting in a seamless, immersive experience.
Users get simplicity but what they don't see is the technology that makes it possible. Together, smart and Accenture created the back-end, leveraging solutions from Adobe, SAP and Salesforce and a custom, serverless, cloud-native front end for greater flexibility.
A decoupling layer makes it easy to add or remove features, while the design system ensures consistency. The platform captures data from many sources in one place to deliver better insights.
Now, smart has a central platform for lean internal operations and a smooth customer journey—as well as a ground-breaking business model for direct sales and a data-driven future. Building both platform and business model from scratch is no small feat—but with a hyper-personalized approach and a new vision for direct sales, smart is accelerating into the future and together we’re reinventing e-commerce.
