A multinational beauty retailer transforms their business to better support a digital sales delivery model.
SITUATION
Our client needed to augment teams supporting a number of initiatives to transition from a traditional retail model to one using digital tools such as data analytics platforms to improve their business. Existing partnerships had yielded poor retention rates, inadequate fill rates, and lacked flexibility to convert consultants to permanent full-time employees. Apex was chosen as a technical partner because of our demonstrated history providing market analytics and digital transformation guidance, with the scalability and flexibility to address our client’s pain points.
SOLUTION
We initially supported our client’s creative marketing department, effectively providing a team of highly skilled creative program managers and art directors. Our dedicated account manager developed strong relationships with cross-functional team partners and high-level stakeholders, providing a cohesive understanding of the business and invaluable insight into the roadmap required for successful end product delivery.
As client stakeholders recognized our success supporting the creative marketing department, our support expanded to include the digital PMO and digital product management teams. All roles required strong Agile/scrum experience and intangible soft skills to enable collaboration with cross-functional partners. As a result of our deep understanding of the client’s culture and technical needs, we were able to identify consultants with both the required technical expertise as well as soft skills to seamlessly fit into client teams.
Enabled Rapid Shift to Digital Sales
RESULTS
Since our support began in mid-2018, Apex has provided nearly 70 digital consultants across three major product verticals. In addition to the creative program managers and art directors we initially supported, we have expanded to provide technical project managers; product managers; digital SEO analysts; cloud engineers; and DevOps engineers. As a result of our consultants’ support, our client was able to rapidly shift their business model to entirely digital sales when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, crippling much of the traditional retail industry.
Our teams optimized delivery by submitting viable consultants within 24-72 hours, setting aggressive interview timelines, and ultimately filling needs in 1-2 weeks on average. We also conduct regular performance reviews and workforce management, which has resulted in nearly 90% retention, enabling the permanent conversion of nearly 15 contract-to-hire resources to full-time employees thus far.
