Industry
Retail
Omnichannel CX and Intelligent Innovation – The Future of Retail
Services
Microsoft Cloud
TCS and Microsoft Cloud: Driving Business Transformation
Highlights
- Electronics brand Croma was looking to transform its tech operations to ensure stability, resilience, rigor, and cost efficiency.
- The TCS team delivered a stable IT environment capable of assimilating frequent and rapid changes across the landscape, ensuring operational excellence, automation, and business-aligned service delivery.
- The project helped improve end-user experience with simplified processes, faster time to market using automation, self-healing, and reduced system errors.
Overview
Croma, one of India's most trusted electronics brands, is known to prioritize customer satisfaction above all.
To ensure continued satisfaction in line with evolving customer expectations Croma undertook a digital transformation program aimed at delivering unified shopping experiences online, in-store, and mobile platforms.
The transformation and modernization programs were aimed at improving operational efficiency, enhancing customer experience, and ensuring long-term stability and resilience in an increasingly digital-first world. To achieve these goals, Croma needed a strategic partner who could help transform the operating model with improved stability, autonomous service, enhanced customer experience, and frugal service model driven by rigor in operation.
Challenges
Croma had invested in IT projects over the years to ensure stability, resilience, and customer-centric operations.
However, there was a need for comprehensive IT modernization to deliver stability, scalability, and agility to ensure seamless omnichannel experiences. Additionally, Croma’s legacy systems were not designed to support the omnichannel approach. The infrastructure struggled with modern phygital commerce demands, creating performance bottlenecks and system failures that threatened customer experience.
The complexity also generated overwhelming number of incidents and service requests. The volumes needed time to address and meant that the IT team could not focus on any strategic improvements.
Additionally, the significant increase in system complexity due to rapid IT modernization led to incident inflow rising from 3,000 to over 16,000 each month. With over 4,200 open incidents (about 50% open for over 60 days) and more than 2,500 open service requests, the support team had little room to offer structural improvements.
Statistics
The transformation
Croma picked TCS to lead the IT transformation.
The TCS team leveraged their deep contextual knowledge of the retail industry and proven eliminate-automate-optimize methodology, to implement a comprehensive road map focused on operational excellence, automation, and business-aligned service delivery. We used the transformation assessment workbench to create a solution road map to deliver a stable IT environment capable of assimilating frequent and rapid changes across the landscape. We also designed and implemented the solution to deliver:
- Operating model transformation: We implemented an enterprise automation layer and enterprise reliability service layer across applications and infrastructure. This ensured improvements to overall agility and productivity, enabled faster structural fixes, improved incident response time, and set the foundation for an agile, autonomous service model.
- Business metrics-driven service: TCS introduced a business metrics-driven service using business service level agreements (SLAs) and real-time dashboards. In addition, we delivered visibility- and accountability-based end-to-end business process monitoring, which ensured IT performance directly supported the business outcomes.
- Intelligent alerts and incident management: This engine uses dynamic threshold and streamlines incident management by automatically assigning the incidents to the right resolver group per priority, reducing human error and resolution delays.
- Noise reduction and anomaly detection: The contextual algorithms helped suppress irrelevant alerts, correlated events, and proactively identified functional and performance anomalies. This helped reduce false alarms and detect issues before they could impact users.
- Realtime service request resolution: TCS implemented near real-time automation for frequent service requests (eg, password resets, account activations), improving resolution speed, end-user satisfaction, and operational productivity.
- Self-healing and proactive problem management: Automation-led self-healing capabilities improved incident closure rates. In addition, continuous root-cause analysis and post-incident reviews helped eliminate recurring issues and deliver long-term platform stability.
Benefits
The strategic transformation aided a stable, autonomous IT operation model for Croma.
The TCS team helped reshape the operating model to deliver consistent excellence, measurable business value, and future scalability for Croma. By aligning IT performance with business strategies, TCS empowered Croma to drive sustainable growth, enhanced agility, and resilience. The transformation led to a high-performance IT environment with zero major incidents during festival peaks. The project benefits included:
- Over 5,000 production incidents reduced per year with intelligent alerting and automated anomaly detection.
- Uninterrupted business even at a peak of over 90,000 transactions per day during festival seasons. During the 2024 festival sale, Croma handled record transaction volumes seamlessly without a single system disruption.
- A 75% reduction in incident volumes and a 92% reduction in service request turnaround time with automation.
- Support costs were halved, releasing capital for innovation and customer growth.
Srikanth VK
Chief digital officer, Croma
Partnering with TCS has been transformative. Their deep contextual understanding and relentless focus on automation, customer-centric operations, and stability helped us achieve zero downtime during peak seasons—something we hadn’t seen before. TCS has not only helped us optimize cost and reduce incident volumes, it has built an agile, intelligent operations backbone that will support our growth vision for years to come.”
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