Himalaya’s Omni-Channel Journey: Going from Web to Mobile

People are increasingly using their mobile devices in various parts of the buying process—and in some countries, mobile is even the primary channel. How can businesses better serve customers, regardless of their browsing preferences?

The Rise of Omni-Channel

Per this highly insightful Think with Google article, the growing reach of digital is touching every step of the customer journey—and multi-channel retailers operating both ecommerce and in-store channels are being forced to take note. According to a 2015 study by IDC, omni-channel shoppers have a 30% higher lifetime value than those who shop using only one channel. Couple this dynamic with the blazing need for digital transformation, and you can see that businesses need to evolve quickly to ensure future growth opportunities and maintain their relevance among customers.

Himalaya Drug Company Faces a Special Challenge

The Himalaya Drug Company is no different than other retailers in the health and personal care space—customers are going digital and the company needed omni-channel presence to deliver the best possible service.

However, Himalaya is in the unique Indian market, where traffic from mobile devices far surpasses that of laptops and desktops. This means Himalaya had to adjust the customer journey to better serve mobile customers or risk losing market share. The sudden surge in mobile device usage challenged Himalaya to come up with a response—fast.

Fortunately, the IT team recognized the challenge and shifted to a “mobile first” focus. The current website was mobile friendly, but it wasn’t enough and Himalaya was left looking around for options to build iOS and Android apps to drive more revenue through mobile channels.

Passing Muster

Himalaya had strict IT requirements, but also wanted a mobile application development solution with a small learning curve—Himalaya didn’t have the luxury of a big IT development team. This made Telerik Platform by Progress the perfect fit.

A trial run boosted Himalaya’s confidence in Telerik Platform (which will be made available as the DigitalFactory Enterprise Mobility offering soon), and the company used it to build an ecommerce mobile app for iOS and Android. The data integration and cross-platform development capability of Telerik Platform worked to the company’s advantage. The high responsiveness of the Progress technical support team was just the icing on the cake.

As the saying goes, seeing is believing—the results Himalaya achieved with Telerik Platform spoke for themselves. Himalaya developed the app three months ahead of schedule, with half the resources budgeted for it. But that’s not all—40,000 prospects have downloaded the app since launch, and 25% of Himalaya’s transactions are now coming through this app! Talk about ROI.

“We were new to the entire mobile space. We had to look not only at design and development, but also deployment, testing and even analytics,” said Ganesh Ramaswamy, Senior Manager, Digital Wing, Himalaya. “Telerik Platform gave us everything bundled as one, so we jumped in and started building the app.”

Envisioning Future Plans

Building on this outstanding experience, Ganesh plans to take this app global to reach Himalaya’s international customers. Additionally, Ganesh is working on an internal app for the field sales team, which uses a web-based app for logging daily reports. The realm of possibilities for business transformation is limitless, and Himalaya has just scratched the surface.

But there’s more—Ganesh is also considering Progress Sitefinity for its tight integration with Telerik Platform to help the company better manage its wide portfolio of international websites.

“Getting all of our systems aligned and working together is a part of the digital transformation process,” said Ganesh.

Learn More

Progress is proud to help Himalaya make its digital transformation happen. If you’d like to learn more about the company’s transition to mobile, you can read the entire story here.