HCL DX Drives a Multi-Faceted Web Presence for Al-Futtaim

The Challenge

A Shift in “Shopping”

The AI-Futtaim Group is a large, tremendously successful conglomerate business. It is headquartered in Dubai, where the culture and warm climate leads citizens to indoor, mall-style shopping to “keep cool” while buying what they need.

But as the Dubai population grew and the distances for people to get to the malls increased, it became clear that AI-Futtaim needed to reach customers in new ways. Brick-and-mortar stores were simply not enough to sustain business growth and support a vision for the future

What’s particularly interesting about AI-Futtaim is that it is a conglomerate company with separate and diverse business divisions for real estate, retail, automotive and services. It needed a powerful online solution that, at its core, was also diverse and flexible in its capabilities.

The goal was to increase customer reach, bring customers more product knowledge, attract site visitors, and encourage repeat site visits. Through the action of reaching more customers, it became clear that customers’ buying behavior was changing as they got more information about products for sale and became more familiar with them before making a purchase. A great example is where the automotive business provides brochure detail about cars for sale but also can arrange to have the car of interest delivered to the buyer’s home to test drive before purchasing. This has resulted in amazing customer satisfaction.

The web team for each business branch also needed the flexibility to set up and maintain a custom digital site that would address the unique needs of each business. The solution needed to be self-sustaining, easy to fix, and have a backup capability that did not require IT to step in to handle. To maximize efficiency, the web teams for each business needed to be able to fix issues and execute backups themselves.