Olark customer Jane Clayton & Company was recently featured in the winter issue of Retail Technology UK. You can read the full article on pages 52 and 53 of the magazine by going here, but since that article will only be available through May 2015, we've captured some of Jane Clayton's story here on the Olark blog.
Founded by Jane Clayton in 1979, Jane Clayton & Company designs and installs show home, hotel and private client interiors with a team of 50.
When the company launched its online shop in 2013 - a project driven by the founder's son and e-commerce director Bertie Clayton, and interior design graduate Emily Coram - they wanted to offer customers an online process for ordering quality, made-to-measure furnishings, and always be there for their customers in that decision making process.
Customer service as a key differentiator
"Because Jane Clayton & Company sells over 50 luxury interiors brands, we strive to focus on those brands without having our own brand dominating, said Clayton. "We provide a high quality and highly customizable product, but customers can buy those brands from other retailers too. So it's about being as open and contactable as we can be. Putting customer service first, especially when we sell products that can be bought elsewhere, is a key differentiator for us as an online retailer."
According to Clayton, this compelled the company to begin researching live chat options in early 2014. As he says, "We felt that if live chat worked for some of the larger companies where we saw it offered, it could work for our small business just as well."
Having himself had different experiences with live chat, Clayton was conscious of always ensuring a response to a customer using that channel.
"When it works, it works very well. You never know what people are doing on the other end of the phone. They may be having their breakfast, they may be on the bus, they may be in the middle of something else," explained Clayton. "Live chat puts it back in the customer's court: if the retailer is too slow to respond, the customer can just walk away. It makes that point of friction for the customer to start talking to us much lower and opens a more casual dialogue."
The novelty factor was a major draw too. "For some customers, using a new technology and getting a good experience from it can actually be part of their experience with us as a retailer," said Clayton.
Quick responses to easy questions
Ultimately Jane Clayton & Company added Olark live chat to the channels it uses to help customers with bespoke and made-to-measure furnishing purchases. "It's a complex process to sell bespoke curtains or blinds online," says Clayton. "There's quite a bit of choice with length, heading style, that sort of thing. Live chat allows customers to ask details about the manufacturing process or about choosing various options, and continue to browse as they chat."
Even with the complexity of orders being placed, Clayton highlights pedestrian, everday questions as most common. "Simple questions like, 'Is this item in stock?' or 'What's the delivery time to France?' Chat allows us to deliver a very quick response."
Clayton also appreciated the ease of setup, saying there was no investment in additional people and that training was 30 minutes. Now his team is able to review transcripts and highlight recurring questions to build out other parts of its support system, like its database of FAQs.
Developing overseas sales
For Clayton and his team, live chat has been particularly helpful around drop shipping and general supply chain questions. "Before, a customer would call about drop shipping, and we we'd have to place them on hold while we called the shipping center for an answer," said Clayton. "Now, a customer can type a drop ship question and go back to browsing while we work on the answer. Live chat doesn't get them the answer any faster, but at least they're not stuck on hold while they wait."
Chat's also been a helpful tool for serving customers whose first language is not English. "We ship worldwide but only support English in terms of customer support," said Clayton. "People who have reasonable written English but don't have the confidence to call and pay for that call will benefit from live chat."
Clayton says that Olark live chat has played a big role in developing overseas sales for Jane Clayton & Company. "We get inquiries from the Netherlands and Sweden for example. The proportion of overseas customers using live chat is noticeable compared to UK customers. In the future, if we were to offer local language support, we'd look at offering it on live chat too and ensure the prompt in France would be in French, for example."
"Overall, it's allowed us to deal with more customer inquiries per member of customer service staff, so there's been an efficiency improvement, moderate but still significant for the tiny cost of implementation," concluded Clayton.
We want to feature you on the Olark blog. Got a live chat story to tell? Email karl@olark.com to share it.
