Bazaar Voice

Venca’s online customer engagement rockets by 1900% with Bazaarvoice

Background

Venca is a major Spanish retailer of high quality women’s fashion, lingerie and homewares. Part of the 3 Suisses International Group since 1988, it is taking a lead in distance selling and e-commerce, growing into a global player with a strong presence in Spain and Portugal.

Venca’s success is built upon outstanding service, and the company works with Bazaarvoice to engage in meaningful, relevant and mutually beneficial conversations with its millions of customers. It’s an approach that delivers real improvement: to customers, marketing ROI and the bottom line.

Situation

Venca trail-blazed e-commerce, investing in and pioneering online shopping since 1996. The digital world, however, is a fast moving environment and Venca saw that its existing business strategy was causing it to fall behind some of its rivals.

In 2007, 85 per cent of its business still came through offline orders, but customers were moving away from this retail model, preferring instead the speed and convenience of online shopping. Reacting quickly to change, Venca aimed to shift 75 per cent of its business online by 2014. And, at the same time, the company wanted to differentiate itself by demonstrating the quality of its customer service and products.

Venca needed to ensure that online shopping didn’t build a barrier between it and its customers, with a solution that:

• delivered a truly customer centric engagement platform, encouraging high volume rating and review;
• reduced demand on resource intensive feedback channels, such as call centres;
• generated the insight needed for greater conversion and returns on marketing investment; and
• leveraged user-generated content to optimise organic traffic to the website.

Solution

On hearing about Bazaarvoice’s work with other members of the 3 Suisses International Group, Venca’s Benjamin Lavaine saw an immediate opportunity to achieve the company’s goals, “Our objective is to innovate to better serve our customers, because if we don’t, our competitors will. Customer feedback is crucial to this strategy, and with Bazaarvoice we could see the real power of rating and review — and its potential to transform the way that Venca does business.”

Bazaarvoice’s Conversations allows Venca’s customers to rate its products and their experience from one to five stars, with the option of free text comment. Venca, however, didn’t simply want to give its customers the opportunity to give feedback, but to actively encourage them to do so.

Bazaarvoice implemented its ‘Post Interaction Email’ (PIE) solution, which seeks feedback proactively from customers following a purchase. As part of a truly multi-channel strategy, PIE was accompanied by an email campaign calling for opinions, clear messaging across the website and online star ratings included in the offline catalogue, acting as a visual cue for ongoing engagement.

Venca now generates weekly reports, identifying products that have received low scores: consistent discrepancies in clothing colour, for example, can be acted upon immediately. Monthly reports are also generated, linking star ratings to KPIs, including quality control, product volume and sales trends.

Results

“Bazaarvoice’s ability to generate, capture and analyse user generated content is giving us the insight we need to meet and exceed customer expectations,” said Benjamin Lavaine. “The numbers speak for themselves.”

Since implementing Bazaarvoice and PIE in 2011, Venca has seen:

• improving SEO help to increase online sales from 35 per cent to 50 per cent in the past year alone;
• rating and review jump from 100 review submissions a month to 2,000 thanks to the PIE technology — an increase of 1,900 per cent;
• 30 additional orders a week driven through PIE alone; and
• a conversion rate 5 times higher with customers who have interacted with rating and review over those who have not.

Bazaarvoice also allows Venca to optimise its CRM system, capturing invaluable customer insight. It is helping the company to make increasingly intelligent decisions on, for example, content precisely targeted at individual customers and the frequency of engagement to maximise returns on marketing investment.

Benjamin Lavaine said, “Bazaarvoice allows us to focus not simply on the act of purchase, but on a customer experience that creates a cycle of quality and long term loyalty. We can now measure the ‘pulse’ of our brand and understand how we are is perceived by consumers — giving us greater agility to bring them what they want, when they want it, cut costs and boost sales.”