Knowing that for today's consumer, engaging experiences are just as important in physical as online environments, Retail Storey starts its development as a team within leading retail marketing agency, Retail Marketing Group (RMG), focused on the challenges of creating better brand connections online.
The first results came so quickly that Retail Storey became an independent business unit with the mission to create personal and emotive in-store experiences to help its customers grow sales and nurture loyalty.
Their portfolio now includes digital brand experts from household brands such as Epson, Nike, LG Electronics, Warner Brothers, Microsoft, and GoPro.
Challenge
When the time to market is crucial
When the pandemic was declared, stores closed, forcing many RMG clients to pivot to direct-to-consumer models. From this, RMG identified an opportunity to bring the emotive, personal experience of in-store shopping to online retail.
To achieve this, the business needed to pivot from a services model to a digital product and services model and quickly started looking for the best customer collaboration platforms to be embedded as a central piece of their service.
“We knew we didn't have resources and in-house expertise to build a complete and robust omnichannel live chat solution.” says Haley Goodman, Digital Transformation Manager at Retail Storey.
Their primary research took place among shoppers, clients, and agents to see what they would require from a communication system in the company. They also focused on establishing their needs in terms of what they wanted their customer experience to be like.
During their research, one factor stood out the most. Once they discovered Rocket.Chat, they were able to work with the platform’s open-source code to build upon it to meet very specific needs they have.
In particular, they wanted to be able to use the immediate interface of Rocket.Chat and the customer-facing widget, but at the same time, they were interested in manipulating the code in a certain way so that they could create video chats more easily and also introduce an aspect of configuring calendar dates in the future so that they could make appointments.
“Given the high degree of customization that we applied to the solution, having the close support from Fabulor, an official partner of Rocket.Chat, was also an important factor to the product's success.” says Roberto Simi at Retail Storey.
Solution
A fully customizable chat experience
In what comes to Omnichannel, the reason Retail Storey applied Rocket.Chat the most was to enable interaction with customers to start their talk with, produce the customer record so that they knew what was being discussed (which also enabled them to build their database of users), tag, refer back, and see where the customer derives from.
With this solution, their agents have, for example, the mission to decide the best action once a new call comes in. They can send the call to the server, they can do a live video call, can schedule a video call for a certain time in the future, and take many other actions.
Retail Storey has customer records being built on every time an interaction takes place. “That is, without a doubt, something their agents really liked.” explained Haley
Results
Ten weeks for digital transformation
In less than ten weeks, RMG was able to complete the first stage of its digital transformation process and create a new source of revenue in a context where the ability to make brand connections online has become imperative.
Even with the end of the social isolation, Retail Storey could keep its relevance to the group's business and now boasts 97% of successful customer engagement - an expressive result even if compared to face-to-face attendance experiences.
The digital transformation paved the way for winning large customers, such as the giant LG Electronics, which is also reaping good results. LG related an increase in customer satisfaction and online purchase rates.
"Storey's Online Personal Shoppers bring your expert level of product knowledge to life through video and chat," says Haley
This case was brought to our attention thanks to Fabulor, our partner in EMEA.
