Next-gen e-commerce to enable net-zero.

The challenge

Our client First Climate operates in the business of carbon neutrality, assisting private and public sector organizations in achieving their climate and sustainability objectives.

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They identified a need to connect customers to suppliers and find a way to convert the current manual back-office sales process into an effective commercial and user-friendly engine. As such, they required a platform that could not only realize an e-commerce capability but also evolve into a full-featured client relationship portal. 

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Secondly, First Climate was looking for a solution that enables customers to define individual climate protection goals and identify potential savings. Equally, the solution should integrate other elements such as a CO2 footprint calculator and their back-end Finance and Inventory system. 

Furthermore, the client operates in specific industry, multi-lingual, and wants to improve their overall customer experience. 

 

The solution

Because of this specific use case, industry, and requirements touching upon various business areas, we convinced the client to develop an e-com platform instead of buying an off-the-shelf e-commerce tool. The main reason is the flexibility and speed of development of using an LCAP platform, i.e. the short time to value. Starting with a complete process (re-)design to best enable the requirements, we developed through agility a platform called my.FirstClimate.

 

It is a customer experience platform for e-commerce and other online services offered by First Climate. It provides highly intuitive and flexible catalog and check-out functionality as well as integrations to external calculation engines. The extensive fulfillment processes are needed to allow the generation of well-structured invoices, integration to an EU payment provider, and exports to an external finance system with specific requirements. 

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Through the platform, customers can calculate their carbon footprint, reduce their future emissions, and offset the remaining emissions. The app also features a complete backend solution for First Climate, allowing customer registration, case processing, invoice creation, and much more. The app will measure and visualize relevant metrics including for example number of customers, number of Carbon offsetting requests, and completed sales- current and over time.  

It was very important that the styling closely matches First Climate's website to provide a seamless customer experience and the app was built multi-lingual to service both the German and English markets. In the backend setup, Google Tag Manager provides First Climate with real-time analytics, the app is integrated into 2 Active Directories (ADs), follows strict EU GDPR guidelines, and much more. 

 

The results

For First Climate, the solution brings great value in understanding its ongoing operations, how the business grows over time, and helps to better serve its customers. It will also allow comparison to previous years where customer engagement was handled manually. 

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The users of the platform (including customers, suppliers, and First Climate) have transparent insights into the process through automated KPI-based reporting, allowing First Climate to easily manage through the built-in admin functionality and provide a high user experience (UX) through automated notifications. 

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They have now an effective digitized sales process that allows customers to purchase products for their net-zero journey without (manual) interaction with First Climate. It is a scalable platform that can be extended upstream to its customers or downstream to suppliers of climate protection projects. 

 

Last but not least, this project is a lighthouse project for First Climate to accelerate its digital transformation, flexible and with a modern presence.