Rack Room Shoes increases conversions by 25%

Digital transformation drives complexity

The pace of transformation has accelerated across the retail industry in recent years, as entire supply chains, from point of sale, to warehousing and logistics, has been increasingly digitalized. Rack Room Shoes had operated through a strong network of brick-and-mortar outlets for nearly a century; however, was finding itself in increasing competition with other footwear retailers that had made an earlier step into e-commerce. It realized it needed to transform its business and become digital-first to stay competitive.

To kickstart its digital drive, Rack Room Shoes developed online storefronts for its ‘Off Broadway Shoe Warehouse’ and ‘Rack Room Shoes’ footwear brands, which initially ran on an on-premise deployment of SAP Hybris. To further enhance the experience for its customers, Rack Room Shoes migrated this to a hybrid cloud environment, running SAP on Google Cloud Platform. This made it easier to roll out new functionality and improve site usability, by integrating its storefront with additional platforms and services. However, while this boosted sales, it also led to increased complexity and made it difficult to maintain full-stack observability, hindering Rack Room Shoes’ ability to offer seamless customer experiences.

Advanced observability and AI-assistance maximize revenue

Rack Room Shoes realized that in order to maximize conversions and online revenues, it would need to provide customers with an improved e-commerce experience. As such, it needed to take a different approach to tackling the complexity in its hybrid cloud environment. After evaluating the market, Rack Room Shoes chose Dynatrace, identifying that the full-stack observability and AI-assistance it provides would be a major advantage in helping it to optimize customer experiences, increase operational efficiency and maximize outcomes for the business.

Life with Dynatrace

• Improved business outcomes – With Dynatrace, Rack Room Shoes’ teams can understand exactly how customers interact with the company’s e-commerce platforms, from its website to its native mobile app. Dynatrace automatically analyzes every user journey, down to the impact of every click, tap, or swipe. Using the unique capabilities of Dynatrace Session Replay, which is a movie-like review of a user session, teams can now understand how to optimize user sessions, which has helped to increase conversions by 25%.
• Cross-team collaboration – Connecting digital experience and business analytics to full-stack observability metrics has enabled greater collaboration between IT, DevOps, and digital experience teams. This has created significant efficiency gains, freeing up approximately 30% more time for these teams to focus on customer-innovation projects, and enabling them to deliver these to the business faster.
• AI-assistance multiplies productivity – Davis® provides Rack Room Shoes with real-time, highly accurate and actionable insights into performance issues. Alerts contain the precise root cause of any anomalies that arise, reducing false positives and helping Rack Room Shoes to deliver seamless customer journeys. As a result, its IT team can focus its effort where it’s needed most and accelerate innovation in other areas of the business.

“In today’s retail landscape, it’s imperative to turn website visitors into loyal customers. Dynatrace helps us to quickly understand precisely what we need to do to create a great customer experience that increases our conversions.” McNall concluded.