BAYA Vietnam is helping its customers make their house a home with Salesforce

For Vu Anh Nguyen, General Manager of Vietnam-based furniture company, BAYA, furniture is in his blood. Now at the helm of the family business after a successful career in the US, Nguyen is driving a new era of digital transformation that will put the customer at the core of the new BAYA experience.

            “Furniture stores in Vietnam were traditionally small and sold very bulky traditional items, and they didn’t offer a full range of products,” say Nguyen. “It was up to the customer to be savvy enough to identify quality.”

           The market was ripe for disruption, and BAYA’s super-store model transformed Vietnam’s furniture industry. But Nguyen believes the company must now embrace organisation-wide digital transformation to drive its next chapter of innovation.

            “The market has changed so much in Vietnam over the last 14 years,” he says. “We have a lot of competition now and we have a very aggressive vision for growth. It’s not enough to compete just on furniture design any more. BAYA needs to provide the best customer experience available, and we’re putting the technology in place to achieve that.”

At the top of the list for Nguyen is complementing the traditional offline shopping experience with an intuitive online offering, along with a personalised interior design service that makes good on BAYA’s promise to ‘turn your house into a home’. But he’s the first to admit that managing the multiple processes involved required a 21^st-century makeover.

            “Two years ago we didn’t have a good ERP in place, and our custom-built ecommerce platform was not functioning well,” he says. “Everything was basically run on people doing their best. Our sales team was functioning on Google Sheets, free crm software, and on their own cell phones. Salespeople were protective of their leads, and it was very hard to see what the numbers looked liked and how to bring in and convert more leads.”

            The interior design service was also difficult to manage, explains Nguyen. “We’d put the customer in a social messaging group with the designer and salesperson, and send them PDF designs. The customer would make changes and we’d send a new PDF. There was a lot of back and forth." Now the team at BAYA uses Quip to boost productivity and collaborate securely across teams. As a result, the design process is faster and more efficient.

            And with five to six different customer databases, leads were not being effectively tracked and unstructured data was not being utilised to improve customer service outcomes and sell smarter.

            “If a customer walked out of a store, we lost them,” says Nguyen. “Customers filled in paper forms in-store, and these didn’t always get uploaded so a lot of that data was lost. We realised that our shortcoming was not having a single view of the customer. We needed everything in one platform so our whole team could see and manage the customer journey.”

Nguyen knew Salesforce was the solution. He had used Salesforce during his time in the US, and could see how it would transform operations at BAYA. The Customer 360 Platform was deployed to integrate data from multiple customer databases, and Sales Cloud is being used to increase transparency, speed and efficiency across the sales pipeline. This approach has already paid dividends with a major account secured within two months of the Sales Cloud deployment.

            “A client needed to furnish 40 apartments across two floors of an apartment building. She came into a BAYA store in the afternoon and we were able to get the design draft out to her that night,” says Nguyen. “She was impressed with our speed and we closed the deal the next day. Just that single account represents a 3000 per cent return on our investment in Salesforce.”

          But that’s really only the beginning as Nguyen focuses firmly on future innovations. Marketing Cloud went live in March 2020 to drive online lead generation, publicise events and build personalised service journeys.

            “Marketing Cloud is helping us identify and serve high-value customers, and improving our product recommendations. If a customer has purchased a table, we don’t want to recommend another table. We want to suggest chairs to go with that table. Marketing Cloud will enable us to do that.”

But success isn’t just about hard data for Nguyen. BAYA has a strong social conscience and the company has enjoyed a long partnership with Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation. Blue Dragon cares for children and families in crisis, and BAYA has helped fit-out the foundation’s drop-in centres. BAYA employees are also actively encouraged to volunteer at the centres.

            “There was some reticence  at the start from staff who didn’t have much experience interacting with children, but after one day they were asking to go back for more,” says Nguyen. “Our brand value is to help our customer turn their house into a home, and it’s important to extend this value to children and families in need.”

            The future looks bright for Vietnam and BAYA as the country and the company embrace the digital economy. But for Nguyen, that means more than simply providing a world-class ecommerce experience. His aim is to make life better for BAYA customers with a complete home solution.

            “At BAYA, our goal is to help make our customers’ lives easier. In the short-term, that means using tools like Salesforce to deliver the best possible customer experience. In the long-term, we want to build an ecosystem for home solutions. Everything is very fragmented in Vietnam with few alliances between businesses. But there’s an opportunity for complimentary businesses to come together to provide more complete full-service solutions so the customer doesn’t have to go to too many places. I believe that is the future of customer service and Salesforce is helping us get there.  We value our partnership with Salesforce, and learning new things about the Salesforce ecosystem has been very helpful to us.”