Very little growth in online revenues over ten years is not a path to success. Yet that is exactly where PetSmart found itself in 2015 – and senior management made changing this a priority.
Specifically, PetSmart needed the ability to easily add new content to their ecommerce site so they could quickly run promotions and feature new products. Additionally, the company needed to improve visibility and integration across their online presence and the rest of the business. More nimble competitors were offering services like online order-in-store pickup and mobile capabilities. PetSmart needed an answer if they wanted to get on the growth path.
PetSmart did not want the expense, effort, or complexity of hosting the new ecommerce site. Additionally, scalability as well as the ability to implement updates with minimal interruption were critical. A cloud-based solution was the natural choice.
PetSmart agreed to a Publicis Sapient solution using Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Ten-plus years of experience with the cloud model and over 100 successful deployments helped tip the decision toward Salesforce. No other solution came close. PetSmart also appreciated the managed-solution approach – all updates are automatically included and implemented by Salesforce, removing a significant burden and ensuring the latest capabilities are quickly available.
Additionally, the revenue sharing model for Commerce Cloud ensured all parties are focused on the same goals. Salesforce would be in it for the long haul. Finally, the assignment of a Publicis Sapient global program manager for the project – someone who would align all the touch points across PetSmart and resolve potential issues before they became a problem – demonstrated a commitment to doing it correctly the first time.
Zahra, Accessibility Strategy and Technology Specialist coming to us from the W3C. That is amazing. Welcome to all of you. I'm just going to jump right in and get started.
So, I wanted to start with a question for all of you. As experts in this space, can you each take a moment to articulate for people on the call, who might be new to the idea of web accessibility, why it's so important for organisations to create accessible experiences? Both for internal applications and external applications for the general public. Go ahead. Actually, I can pick on you if you like.
Manish, I have you right here in the middle of my grid, if you want to get us started.
Sure. Hi. So in Microsoft we have got, I can distil it down to four reasons why we want to do accessible products. First of all, our mission. Our mission is to empower every person, in every organisation on the planet to achieve more. And every person basically does include people with disabilities. So that is our mission and that is the philosophical underpinning of everything that we do. It's given that we want to include people with disabilities in our products.
Other than the philosophical reasons though, I mean there is other reasons, like the impact. You know, more than a billion people in the world live with disabilities. This is not just a static demographic, it's... Everybody becomes a part of this billion at some point in their life, as they age, as they go through life. The thing is that people with disabilities have a disproportionate hardship in terms of employability. They are more unlikely to be unemployed than everybody else. Not just that, there's an economic impact. If we make our products more accessible, we find that, you know, we are able to sell them more. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to share the numbers, but it's a nontrivial amount that we gain just because we, our products are more accessible than the competition. That number is likely to quadruple in the next two years based on our recent analysis. Just the impact, social impact, the economic impact, on - even impact on hiring people. It's a pool of people with disabilities, a pool of people that is untapped for hiring for recruitment. Just the impact is huge.
The third reason is my least favourite, but important all the same, legislation - legal and risk. So compliance to legislations across the world. We do it because we have to do it.