Global Beauty Brand Cuts Cost and Improves Customer Experiences

A global beauty products brand was running a fast-growing digital ecosystem across more than 50 sites and 28 platforms spanning commerce, data and consumer engagement across the Americas.

As the ecosystem expanded, it became harder to keep sites fast, stable and working as expected for customers, whether they were browsing products, logging in or completing a purchase, leading to slower issue resolution, inconsistent site performance and more customer-facing problems like slow load times, failed checkouts and broken site features.

Publicis Sapient worked with the organization to simplify how operations were run across teams and platforms, introducing Sapient Sustain, our AI-powered IT operations platform. The result was faster resolution of site and platform issues, lower cost to run day-to-day operations and a more stable foundation for delivering consistent shopping and brand experience across regions.

The ecosystem had become critical to how the business operated, but it wasn’t built to run as one connected system.

More than 50 brand sites across the U.S., Canada and LATAM depended on 28 interconnected platforms across commerce, data, loyalty, content and customer engagement. Each system played a role in delivering customer experiences, but they were managed independently.

Running this environment required constant coordination across vendors, tools and teams:

• Issues, like checkout failures, often moved between teams before reaching the right owner
• Each team saw only their part of the system, not how issues impacted the full customer journey
• Teams had to piece together data from multiple systems to diagnose (and fix) problems
• Recurring issues were handled repeatedly instead of addressed at the source

Even routine issues became time-consuming, requiring coordination across teams before resolution could begin. A slowdown in one platform could trigger issues in others, but there was no single view to trace root cause and impact quickly.

As demand for connected online and offline experiences increased, these gaps became more visible. Releases of new site features, campaigns and integrations slowed, issue backlogs grew and keeping experiences consistent across brands and regions took more effort it should have.

Over time, teams were putting in more work to maintain performance but not seeing better results. The business needed a more reliable way to run operations—and one that could scale without adding more complexity.

With Sustain, the brand was able to redesign the operating model to make day-to-day operations easier to manage and less dependent on manual coordination without replacing existing systems.

This approach combined structural changes with AI-driven capabilities:

• Unified operating model: Consolidated multiple vendors into a single structure with clear ownership across systems and incidents
• AI-driven pattern detection: Connected data across systems to identify trends and surface issues earlier
• Self-healing workflows: Automated resolution of common, repeatable problems to reduce manual effort
• Integrated service reporting: Established a single, real-time view of performance, incidents and business impact
• Governance and accountability: Standardized processes and reporting across all partners
• Improved ways of working: Reduced handoffs, improved collaboration and enabled faster, more reliable production releases

Together, these changes reduced delays caused by disconnected systems and made it easier to identify and fix issues before they affected customer experiences.

The transformation delivered measurable improvements across cost, speed and operational efficiency:

• 35% reduction in operational costs
• 33% reduction in operational debt
• 50% improvement in mean time to resolution
• 10% reduction in reopened tickets
• 55+ automation utilities deployed

Digital experiences are now more consistent across brands and regions, with fewer disruptions affecting customers. Issues are resolved faster, with fewer repeat failures, and teams spend less time coordinating across systems.

With a clearer view across platforms and defined ownership in place, the business can roll out new features, campaigns and integrations with fewer delays—while maintaining a more reliable experience for customers.