Pandora Sticks to the Plan

With some 3,200 franchised, independently owned and corporate stores, the fast-growing Danish jewelry retailer Pandora needs to ensure customer relationship management (CRM) consistency throughout its operation — especially during the heavily promotional holiday season. It does so by using the Microsoft Dynamics CRM system and a retail portal based on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. The solution helps ensure that every store is aligned with the same marketing and customer service plan.



“We use Dynamics for tracking of visual merchandising at stores,” explained Phillip Kennedy, director of IT for Pandora, whose North American division is based in Columbia, Maryland. “We do store visits and upload photos of holiday promotions, tagged for management to review.”



In addition, Pandora uses a custom cloud-based platform-as-service (PaaS) retail portal built on Microsoft Azure for sharing CRM information, such as product master files. Through the portal, Pandora also executes holiday promotions, such as new product drops and email releases, across the organization.



“We manage retailer participation and planning and go back to review their performance,” said Kennedy. “We get our biggest promotional volume during the Christmas and Hanukkah holidays, as well as Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. We’re able to scale up to handle the volume. Microsoft technology allows us to do it easily without significant increases in staffing.”