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City Furniture Cuts Shopper Journey Time 50% With Associate-Facing Apps

In conjunction with IBM and Apple, City Furniture has developed new mobile apps to improve the customer experience within its showrooms. The move has significantly enhanced shopper-associate interaction, cutting in half the time required for a customer to select the product, choose services and delivery, then make a payment or apply for credit.

To expedite this in-store shopper journey, City Furniture launched three MobileFirst for iOS apps for iPad Pro: ASAP (Accelerating Sale Associates’ Performance), Payment, and Finance. City Furniture is rolling out the apps to 400 store associates across 15 City Furniture showrooms and 12 Ashley Furniture HomeStore showrooms in South Florida.

Compared with its previous in-store experience, City Furniture sales associates using these apps saw:

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  • 5% growth in the average purchase order per customer;

  • 18% growth in average in-home warranty service sales; and

  • 17% growth in average stain protection service sales.

Additionally, the more streamlined interactions reduced average discounts, which both cut into store profits and prevent sales associates from meeting monthly sales goals and quotas, by 60%.

With the apps, City Furniture associates have real-time access to more than 8,000 SKUs, complete with images, product information, colors, styles and unique customer profiles. Since customers can now see photos of products in their cart before they pay, they can visually confirm the accuracy of their order, resulting in fewer credit or invoice rewrites.

Optimizing The Sales Associate With Mobile

Steve Wilder, CFO/CIO at City Furniture, noted that City Furniture wanted to make the sales associate as effective as possible so that they have all the contextual and photographic information they could possibly need to answer any questions the customer poses, all while avoiding any potential disengagement from the customer.

“In our previous environment, associates would often be unable to answer a customer’s questions, had to disengage, walk back to a fixed terminal to try to determine the answer, and then hopefully be able to reengage with the customer,” Wilder said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “We realized we needed to change that process to affect our closing rate, and to allow us to compete more effectively. Furniture is a little behind the curve in terms of technological advances, but certainly customers are experiencing this level of technical solution in other shopping experiences and other industries. They’re going to expect it.”

Store Manager Provides Input Into App Development

Britney West, Assistant Store Manager at the City Furniture location in Tamarac, Fla., noted that as a salesperson, “you are only as good as what you know and how confident you are in what you know.” West has served as the face and ambassador of the new apps since the app development process began. As part of the process, City Furniture brought West to Cupertino, Calif. to brainstorm with the IBM and Apple developers, helping tailor the apps to the retailer’s specific needs.

“I give kudos to the team out in Cupertino, because I thought it was going to be the IT team developing the app, but they were there mainly to answer questions,” West said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “They asked us about our day-in-the-life, and our pain points. ‘What about your job makes it harder for you to do it, and how can we make it easier and faster. How can we make it better for the customer?’ They really focused on what we experience in the store every day.”

Wilder also attended the Cupertino meeting, along with three other IT employees from City Furniture and various engineers from Apple and IBM.

Finance In Real Time, Not At The End

While the team primarily molded the apps to aid associates in making sales, they also were developed to ease the financing process for consumers. The average ticket on a financed transaction is $2,100, more than double the $900 to $1,000 range for an average transaction paid for via credit card, according to Wilder. Such a substantial increase makes it important for the retailer to simplify financing processes.

Before the retailer used iPads, the associate would take care of the financing process at the end of the purchase. These employees would then often spend numerous hours with the customer to gauge whether they would be eligible for financing, only for them to get denied by one of their banks. Embarrassed or frustrated consumers would then walk out of the store without making a purchase at all, taking away valuable time for everyone involved.

The new Finance app is designed to enable a customer to apply for traditional retail financing, through a City Furniture or Ashley Furniture Consumer Finance Account, to pay an invoice during the journey, instead of at the point-of-purchase.

“As soon as you have that conversation with the customer about financing, you can sit down wherever you are and fill out the application much faster than before,” West said. “You’re still in that buying environment when the consumer is making the purchase, which increases sales and helps us attach our service numbers, which are programs that we offer to protect their investment.”

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