Case study : Wondersoft - Managing multiple retail applications

Wondersoft was established in the year 1996. With over 100 employees, Chennai-based, Wondersoft focuses on unique and innovative solutions for retail and distribution businesses. Wondersoft has over 6000 satisfied customers in India and abroad across various segments. 

The company is looking towards a growth rate of 75 per cent for this year alone with the portfolio of solutions expanding in the area of agro retail, HR solutions, manufacturing, hospitality, fashion businesses, textile industries and others.

 Wondersoft offers a complete online retail suite, eShopaid. It is a web based integrated retail solution.  Wondersoft also offers eShopaid on SaaS (Software as a Service). 

Wondersoft also has recently launched WhoIsIn?, a unique web-based biometric attendance tracking system, especially targeted at retail chains. Some of the companies that Wondersoft has catered to are YLG Salon & Spa, Cartridge World, Future Group (Tulsi the medicine bazaar), Agrimart (Ratnagiri Impex Pvt Ltd), Toonkidz, Open Medicines(Emicare Health), Jansons, Healthguard (Srilanka), Supermed Pharmacies and many more chains and thousands of independent retailers across the country.

CASE STUDY

YLG Salon and Spa was founded in March 2008 by a group of professionals with a vision to build a long-term beauty business which adds great value to its customers. Head quartered in Bangalore, YLG seeks to make a huge difference to the way the business is conducted, the level of skill and professionalism in dealing with its customers.

Challenge

YLG offers multiple membership schemes to its customers, and is the first to offer unlimited usage of a service for members. A customer could be a member of multiple schemes at the same time, could also visit any of the salons in the network. The challenge was in having complete information about customers including preferences, likes and dislikes. Identifying members correctly, getting customer feedback, and avoiding misuse of member status were other challenges. Other than the services, each salon retails health & beauty products, which need to be managed. The retailing operations were conducted in a different entity.

Solution provided and benefits

The web based integrated solution, eShopaid, was implemented for the retail and salon chain. Although they are two companies, the interface for service and retail billing was kept the same for user convenience.

The customer feedback is compulsory and is a part of the billing process.  With the integrated SMS module, every customer immediately gets an SMS on completion of the services and bill generation.

With access to live inventory levels at the stores, it has been possible to maintain optimised inventory levels.

With eShopaid, the management team has total control of the business from anywhere and everywhere. There is no IT team, but still every detail is readily available for the core team, be it online pivot-tables or reports. It’s a single application, right from the head office to the warehouse and stores, and user training saves on costs and is easily done.

Biometric identification of the customer is in trial currently at a few salons to make it easier to identify members.

“Our partnership with Wondersoft has helped us to actually get to know our customers better. The CRM engine built on top of the existing retail server configuration has enabled us to register, keep track of every single customer and her visits, service preferences, and connect with her via SMS, which is great for reducing our customer retention costs and generating high ROI.”

Rahul Bhalchandra, CEO, R & R Salons Pvt Ltd. 

“Organised retailers, having become wiser with the slowdown in the last year, would come out very strongly and expand in 2010, although cautiously. They would also like to justify their spends in IT, instead of going by the brands and hence provide a good opportunity for companies like us, who provide cost-effective yet efficient solutions.”

Sabhari Shankar Chidambaram, Director, Wondersoft