Coca-Cola HBC: Creating consistent omnichannel customer experiences in digital commerce with cloud solutions
The secret ingredient in the digital experience
Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company sought to expand its sales business while enhancing the customer experience with digital commerce capabilities. The SAP Commerce Cloud solution offers functionalities for flexible and consistent digital order placement and customer self-services alongside improved data security by utilizing SAP Customer Data Cloud solutions, paving the way for an omnichannel experience.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Consumer products | Zug, Switzerland | 33,000 employees |
business customers using SAP Commerce Cloud.
customer orders placed each month using SAP Commerce Cloud.
release of SAP Commerce Cloud every two weeks, instead of every eight weeks.
Head of Digital Consumer and Customer Platforms and Digital Factory, Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company AG
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Consumer products | Zug, Switzerland | 33,000 employees |
business customers using SAP Commerce Cloud.
customer orders placed each month using SAP Commerce Cloud.
release of SAP Commerce Cloud every two weeks, instead of every eight weeks.
Head of Digital Consumer and Customer Platforms and Digital Factory, Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company AG
Increasing customer orders while enhancing customer experiences
Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company AG (Coca-Cola HBC) bottles and sells the beverages of The Coca-Cola Company exclusively in its 29 markets. It offers consumer-leading brands in the sparkling, juice, water, sport, energy, plant-based, ready-to-drink tea, coffee, adult sparkling, snacks, and premium spirits categories. The vision at Coca-Cola HBC is to be the leading 24x7 beverage partner – growing with its 715 million consumers by ensuring it has a beverage for each occasion around the clock.
Customer centricity and the customer experience are everything at Coca-Cola HBC. The company was predominantly selling directly to its B2B customers, such as restaurants, small stores, and kiosks, through its sales teams and call centers. It wanted to grow the volume of customer orders and increasingly drive traffic from the call center to an online channel. In so doing, it sought to make the customer experience as smooth, timely, and consistent as possible.
Head of Digital Consumer and Customer Platforms and Digital Factory, Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company AG
Creating e-commerce capabilities for consistent customer engagement
The SAP Commerce Cloud solution provides Coca-Cola HBC with a B2B e-commerce capability, enabling business customers to place orders online at any time. The web portal, shown in the diagram below, gives customers a real-time view of their order status and history and invoices as well as access to additional services relating to their interactions.
With many business customers being of a small size and used to a digital consumer experience in their day-to-day lives, they expect the same experience when dealing with Coca-Cola HBC, whether placing an order or making a request. SAP Commerce Cloud is designed to be mobile responsive and supports use across devices, which is a necessity for customers. The company is constantly expanding its use of the solution’s functionalities so it can answer customers’ questions quickly and save them from having to approach the contact center or sales teams.
The deployment of the SAP Customer Data Cloud portfolio at Coca-Cola HBC introduces modern capabilities in customer and consumer identity and access management. Part of the SAP Customer Experience portfolio, the solutions enable the collection, transparency, and harnessing of customer information. They help ensure data is secure by managing challenges around data privacy and give new capabilities around self-registration and self-service, allowing identities for new customers to be created safely.
The integration of SAP Commerce Cloud with SAP S/4HANA as the back-end software allows communication of prices, promotions, available-to-promise inventory, and credit information in real time. This integration centralizes the order management process. By using SAP Business Technology Platform and the Cloud Integration capability within SAP Integration Suite, Coca-Cola HBC can connect several order-placing channels and marketplaces to its ERP application. For example, while B2B comprises the majority of the company’s business model, it’s piloting the use of SAP Commerce Cloud for the direct-to-consumer (D2C) business in Egypt. This means that the same team can develop, code, and manage the solution, which brings synergies and economies of scale. It also provides a consistent and stable solution that’s plugged into the rest of the IT architecture in the Coca-Cola HBC estate.
SAP Services and Support helped the company achieve a successful integration thanks to its expertise around solution development and implementation. The 20-week deployment went smoothly, and there was no impact after the go-live event.
Head of Digital Consumer and Customer Platforms and Digital Factory, Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company AG
Improving release frequency, customer numbers, and the omnichannel experience
Coca-Cola HBC is using SAP Commerce Cloud as its commerce engine, delivering the cloud-first, mobile-first experience it desires. On the business side, customer acquisition and retention are improving, and more than 160,000 customers are registered on the customer portal.
From a technical perspective, the company can carry out more regular release cycles of the solution – every two weeks rather than once every four to eight weeks. The rapid releases allow Coca-Cola HBC to bring new features to customers quicker and in a more stable way than before. Plus, it can take advantage of the core SAP product enhancements released periodically during the year. Unlocking faster releases and giving fresh features to customers frequently, such as new services or “look-and-feel” improvements, underpins a better customer experience.
The solution helps free up time for sales teams, or “business developers” in particular, as they’re not tied up taking orders. Instead, the teams can focus on developing the business since they have extra time to visit more customers and can spend quality time with them. And customers don’t have to call these teams to check on an order status or wait for a visit from them to place an order.
Coca-Cola HBC is getting closer to having an omnichannel experience for the customer as it can now track customers and their behaviors. It’s able to use real-time data from SAP Commerce Cloud to see customer interactions, such as emptied baskets or unfulfilled orders, and connect this to its marketing capabilities to take advantage of product up-sell or cross-sell opportunities. This could be a sales team visit, contact center call to the customer, or a prompt through the web portal to remind the customer to pick up where they left off or inform them of a promotion, for example.
The benefits of using SAP Customer Data Cloud are enhanced security, privacy, and the ability to onboard registered customers quickly. The native integration with SAP Commerce Cloud means the solutions synchronize well with each other.
Head of Digital Consumer and Customer Platforms and Digital Factory, Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company AG
Focusing on flexible storefronts, conversational commerce, and master data
Another element of Coca-Cola HBC’s e-commerce architecture – and the “target state” for its different use cases – is the planned adoption of composable storefront software for SAP Commerce Cloud. This technology provides a flexible JavaScript storefront to build and maintain shopping experiences and SAP solution integrations. With this flexibility, the company hopes to further enhance user experiences across multiple business models and sales channels, including B2B2C, e-marketplaces, D2C, subscription, B2C, new media networks, and the metaverse, and in turn, drive the customer experience.
Coca-Cola HBC will continue its efforts to link the digital marketing and digital commerce capabilities and is currently working on a notification center to this end. On the mobile front, the company is making inroads into conversational commerce by connecting WhatsApp to SAP Commerce Cloud, whereby customers can order products through the messaging app. It views this as a promising future channel, especially in some of the emerging markets such as Nigeria, where a pilot project is being conducted.
Given the importance of the customer experience at Coca-Cola HBC, the business wants to make sure it has top-quality master data that feeds into its various software solutions. Getting the right customer details, including name, address, and tax or VAT number, is vital. It’s just as important to have the correct contact data, such as an e-mail address, for digital marketing purposes. The company intends to use the SAP Master Data Governance application to gain better control over its customer master data and consequently, improve the quality of that data to further boost its capabilities in the digital commerce space.