T2 & Infinity: making shopping contactless in quick response to COVID-19
350% increase in click-and-collect orders
T2 Tea, the premium tea brand, has physical sites around the globe, plus wholesale and eCommerce channels. Known for doing things differently, T2’s beautiful stores are an immersive experience where you can learn, taste and support diversity, inclusion and sustainability.
As stores needed to close to protect team members and customers due to COVID-19, the T2 and Triquestra teams worked together to continue offering Australian shoppers a superior omnichannel purchasing experience. A contactless one that puts safety first.
Quick click-and-collect rollout
In Australia, T2 closed its retail stores to prioritise people’s health. From that point on, online ordering and delivery was available and the website was running at its peak every day. At the T2 warehouse, spacing between people, split shifts and assigned equipment were just some of the mandated measures put in place to keep the team safe and moving ahead with orders.
When the easing of restrictions was announced, planning began to roll out T2’s click-and-collect service in 20 stores. Rohan Penman, T2’s Global Head of Technology says, “We had worked on a click-and-collect pilot with Triquestra through February that included integrating loyalty data and the website with Infinity. That early process mapping put us in a good position and we used the pilot learnings to relaunch click-and-collect quickly.”
Infinity handles the pressure – and unknowns
“Instead of a controlled click-and-collect roll out throughout Australia, we launched during COVID-19 and the run up to Mother’s Day weekend. We were heading into the unknown,” says Rohan.
He adds that T2’s mantra for click-and-collect was to ensure team safety and create the lowest number of contact touchpoints. Click-and-collect is inherently contactless because there’s no need for EFTPOS machines or cash since everything is prepaid online. Each store had only one team member working at a time for added social distancing. To help these busy T2 store workers, the customer service team at T2 headquarters helped monitor the click-and-collect orders and enquiries via the order orchestration dashboard.
“Using Infinity for live inventory lookups is invaluable. So is our inbuilt Infinity click-and-collect dashboard that lets us see how orders are progressing and if they’re meeting our 3-hour SLA. This information feeds directly into our sales dashboard so we can keep an eye on our customer experience.”
Rohan says, “Previously, we thought we’d get a small number of click-and-collect orders through our stores on a ‘normal’ day. With Mother’s Day on the way, stores were processing 10 times more orders than we expected every day. And if you take into account that one person had to do everything to get those orders ready, from an operations point it was very challenging. Our team did an amazing job,” says Rohan.
Not only did store staff have to prepare the click-and-collect orders that came through, shopping centres were open so people arrived at the doors wanting to buy our products. Those people were instructed to place their order via the T2 website so it could be processed consistently. Rohan says, “Our normal click-and-collect turnaround is three hours but our teams were filling them as quickly as possible so shoppers could get on their way again.”
“We got around 350% more orders through click-and-collect than we anticipated due to these unique circumstances. And Infinity was great at handling them all. It is really intuitive. We had no outages and no issues.”
90% + fit-for-purpose platform functionality
Rohan says he was confident that Infinity would serve them well in these trying times and at the pace of change that was required because it’s a proven retail unified commerce platform.
“When we selected Infinity as our retail platform in 2019, functionality-wise, it was a 90% plus fit straight away. That compatibility reduced overall development requirements and times. We’ve integrated with Salesforce and Netsuite quickly and we’re continuing to consolidate loyalty, and promotions and pricing into Infinity to make life even easier.”
Looking forward, Rohan believes that click-and-collect will remain a popular fulfilment option. “It’s definitely woken up a sleeping giant. I think people will keep using it for its flexibility, especially when coordinating shopping around work and looking after children. You can book in your order and know when it will be ready and waiting for pickup. There’s the continued contactless safety aspect as well. Click-and-collect lets people shop how they want to and how they feel comfortable.”
“Infinity is a fantastic solution and its click-and-collect functionality is definitely fulfilling a purpose that we couldn’t have predicted a few months ago. We appreciate all the support from the Triquestra team and we’re very thankful click-and-collect was on the digital roadmap.”
Next on T2’s roadmap is store-to-door fulfilment to give consumers even more choice. Rohan says, “We’re working closely with the TQ team on this next customer experience iteration. We have great collaboration in place to help us deliver new customer experiences fast.”
He concludes, “We have a good partnership and we’ve got one unified platform that solves our problems quickly and efficiently so we can introduce even more innovative and flexible solutions to our customers.”
Interested in offering click-and-collect to your customers? Contact us to discuss how Infinity can help you stay ahead and improve customer experiences across the board. And be sure to have a look at the magical tea making at T2: t2tea.com
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