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.
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.
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 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.
In addition, the Rocket.Chat environment is installed in the Fabulor cloud. This cloud is GDPR compliant and runs on a server based in the UK. With Fabulor’s Rocket.Chat cloud Storey can provide a 24/7 service to its customers.
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 Hayley
In less than ten weeks, Retail Storey 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.
“Now, Retail Storey is ready to roll out this proposition to the rest of the world. Lots of brands need to really interact and connect with their potential customers. It is fabulous to see the product you want to buy almost live in this solution” says Diederick Splinter, CEO of Fabulor.
The digital transformation paved the way for winning large consumer electronic brands. All of whom saw 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 Hayley