Women’s health champion raises bar with innovative app

When K-C wanted to develop an innovative platform to connect and educate, it turned to Sitecore to create a KIRA, an app dedicated to improving women’s lives – and designed to strengthen brand equity, engagement, and loyalty.

Despite dramatic modernization across a broad spectrum of areas, attitudes, and resources associated with menstruation remain primitive in large parts of the world. Even in the US, 1-in-5 girls miss school due to ‘period poverty’, the lack of access to menstrual products, and many females are ill-equipped to manage their fertility. At the same time, in the fast-moving consumer goods industry, finding fresh ways to connect with shoppers is challenging.

Since introducing the world's first disposable menstrual pads, K-C is continuing its century-long commitment to enable women to manage their periods with dignity. Supporting this endeavor, K-C wanted to produce an app to provide millions of 15 to 24-year-old women with a completely new experience from what its static product site offered.

KIRA was designed as an engaging, educational, and relevant innovation-driven app. The goal was to enhance and tailor the customer experience through personalized conversations, targeted products, and activities to help improve the health and well-being of women around the world. The period calculator empowers women by helping them capture their individual experiences, understand their cycles, and provide information and resources. Armed with this information, K-C is equipped to personalize interactions and target products to meet each woman’s unique needs.

A first of its kind, KIRA is a progressive web app built on the Sitecore platform in partnership with Accenture and Avanade. An on-premises deployment, KIRA integrates with headless Salesforce commerce, marketing, and sales clouds to enhance and tailor the customer experience.

The app helps women with period calculation, identifying fertility days, maintaining a flow register, water and pill intake, symptom tracker, cycle start-date reminders, and more. The personalized home page offers product recommendations and e-commerce and subscription options. Keyword search recommends relevant articles and links to FAQs, resources, and social media integrations for community support.

The app first went live in Brazil in early May 2021, and over the next six months, K-C will roll out additional features and enhancements. There are also plans for the app to go live in Australia by the end of the summer and eventually, in more countries in Latin America.

KIRA is revolutionary in its support for menstrual management education and access for millions of girls.

With enhanced, personalized interactions, the platform increases brand engagement, loyalty, and ultimately, revenue. With KIRA, K-C has achieved a 10% reduction in call handle time, bounce rates have dropped by 20%, and online sales have increased 5% — both in revenue and number of orders.