It’s easy to say customer experience is your No. 1 priority, but offering a truly seamless journey is often brutally complicated on the backend. So, London-based luxury retailer Harrods uses SAP technology to ease that backend burden and deliver a silky-smooth customer experience across all its channels, which include a growing ecommerce site, private shopping in China, and more.

But Harrods’ most important channel is still its flagship store.

“When we talk about luxury and the importance of experience, the store is core to what we do,” Erik Rasmussen, head of SAP & Data Analytics at Harrods, told SAP on the NRF 2023 showfloor. “Having that single flagship store is still absolutely crucial to Harrods’ DNA and something that we expect to drive going forward for a long time.”

Harrods’ flagship store is about 1 million square feet (about 93,000 square meters) of retail space in Knightsbridge, an upscale London neighborhood known for grand Victorian and Georgian homes, fine dining, and, of course, high-end shopping. This single, full-line department store offers food, fashion, homeware, furniture, and technology – and it reaped £2.4 billion in sales last year.

“So, small footprint but massive business,” Rasmussen said, noting that the flagship store alone carries more than 400,000 products from about 4,000 brands. “And incredible things [are] going on every day.”

To keep incredible things happening, Harrods and SAP invested in the Single View of Customer project, an analytics initiative to help Harrods better understand how customers interact with the brand. When Harrods can accurately anticipate what shoppers will want, it can deliver memorable experiences that make delighted customers say, “Wow!”