The COVID-19 pandemic hit just as secondhand furniture retailer Cort was getting knee deep into a digital strategy aimed at giving customers greater access, visibility and transparency. Find out how the retailer kept the course and the wins coming into play.
A Cort showroom. Photo provided.
Timing, as the saying goes, is everything, and it couldn't be truer when it comes to one furniture retailer's quest to go digital.
The retailer is Cort, which provides everything from furniture rentals to event furnishings, destination services as well as operating retail furniture outlets. It's part of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate and has more than 100 locations across the U.S., as well as operations in the U.K., and boasts partners in more than 80 countries. It was founded in 1972.
The retailer's digital experience journey began in 2019, just before COVID-19 arrived and began flipping the retail industry on its heels and changing every CX strategy in place. Stores shuttered and consumers stormed online for everything from groceries to clothing and, yes, to furniture needs.
In 2020, just as the coronavirus hit hard in the U.S., Cort evolved its digital strategy to offer more accessibility, visibility and most important, transparency, to the customer.
To gain insight on what it took to make it happen and the increasing benefits gained, Retail Customer Experience reached out to Mindy Oliver, marketing director, online strategy, media and analytics at Cort.
Q: What is driving the need to be transparent to the customer? Is it customer demand or industry competition or maybe a mix of both? And why is transparency more important at this point?
A. Cort's business model has been designed with a customer-first mindset. With that, we are always looking for new ways to reach our customers and exceed expectations throughout the entire customer journey. In looking to better understand the needs of our furniture outlet customers, we realized a large transparency gap existed in the secondhand furniture industry. While online marketplaces will continue to be a resource for buying secondhand furniture, there lacks an alignment in what "used" means, and that can vary so drastically by seller.
Cort aimed to help standardize what "used" means and ultimately, we launched the new Cort Outlet digital experience to offer the same level of commitment and transparency across all aspects of our business — including digital. With the new website, we introduced the furniture condition guide, which customers can equate to buying used books. Our furniture is labeled into one of three categories including new, used and bargain. Products listed as "new" have not been previously leased and while they may cost a little more than some of our other items, you're still getting them at an incredibly low outlet price. Furniture labeled as "used" or "bargain" may have a few imperfections but are less expensive and typically a great bargain for any home or office. In addition, customers can also see customer reviews on the website via Google, Yelp and Facebook to gain even more transparency into the customer experience.
Cort wants our customers to feel confident in their purchases. All merchandise sold in our furniture outlets has been Cort Certified™ which is our commitment to your satisfaction. This promise offers customers 14 days to return the purchase if they are not satisfied. The Cort Clean Certified commitment also guarantees the furniture has been inspected, sanitized and protected. Lastly, if the product proves to be defective after 90 days it will be replaced or repaired. This promise is not one many find within other second hand businesses and is just one of the many ways we aim to satisfy our customers.
Q: When and why did the digital experience strategy start and how did you go about getting it going? Did you enlist a consultant or outside help, form an inside team? Did you deploy any specific technology solution?
A. In 2019, we rebuilt and relaunched the Cort.com website to rethink and improve the online customer experience. In 2020, these digital strategy plans continued to evolve for Outlet to offer more accessibility and visibility for the customer. As I mentioned above, when purchasing furniture on this new site, customers can buy new as well as previously leased furniture while knowing the exact condition the item is in before purchasing. Our new website also allows our team access to more consumer data to assist with future improvements to the site and enhance the overall customer experience whether that be online or in one of our showrooms. For instance, the site's new algorithm can pull from a localized inventory based on a customer's location so they know the exact pieces that are closest to them, and the distance to travel for pickup or delivery expense can both be reduced.
All digital execution for this new experience was led in-house with the help of our online strategy and business development teams. The Cort Furniture Outlet website is built on the same infrastructure as Cort.com, the domain for our furniture rental business. This allowed us to achieve scalability across systems and teams including IT, marketing, sales, CRM, customer support and so many others that work to deliver an extraordinary customer experience.
Q: What is the digital experience providing to customers that they didn't have before and do you have any measure of customer response or feedback?
A. While the Cort Furniture Outlet business transformation project was kicked off in early 2020, the pandemic definitely gave us a different perspective. Through opportunities like SEO enhancement, supporting our customers' shift to shopping online and overall making it easier to find and purchase secondhand furniture was always our end goal — whether the customer is shopping online or in-store.
Just two weeks after launch, we saw online conversions rates increase by 37%, overall online purchase volume increase by 69% and organic traffic increase by 30%. These success metrics are a testament to how much testing and customer feedback went on behind the scenes throughout the building process and how the new site is resonating with our shoppers.
Q: Where does the digital strategy fall within the Cort leadership and is it purely a marketing led effort or a team incorporating leaders from other units?
A. One of the primary reasons I joined Cort seven years ago was this opportunity to be a leader of digital strategy and stand at the intersection of marketing and technology. Digital strategy at Cort incorporates everything from understanding our different customer segments, their needs and then very efficiently building solutions, developing messaging and targeting and ultimately driving new, measurable business opportunities for Cort. As Cort engages with customers from individuals relocating to rethinking workplaces and planning events — meeting customers where they are and ensuring a top-notch experience, digital strategy will be a component of our commitment to our customers every time.
Q: Any tips for other retailers looking to launch a similar initiative? Anything you would have done differently looking back?
A. Keep your customer values at the center of every decision. For Cort, that meant providing customers the opportunity to engage with our product at a level where the integrity of our brand is promised, and we did so without cutting corners. Online customer feedback was incorporated into our design along with feedback from customer surveys. These elements will continue to be drivers for future enhancements as well as sit at the core of how we measure our own performance. We also looked for ways to bring customers into the development process through user testing, which confirmed our implementation of the furniture condition guide throughout the user experience and led to a more successful launch.
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August 30, 2021 at 05:00PM
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Furniture retailer shares insight on driving digital strategy during a pandemic - Retail Customer Experience
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