Illums Bolighus helps shoppers turn their house into a home with Salesforce
Scandinavian retailer enhances omnichannel shopping and service experience with Salesforce.
4 min read
What makes a house a home? The right décor can set the mood, welcome you back after a long day at work, and provide a backdrop for your most precious memories. Even for the unartistic, home décor is an opportunity to express your personality and make your mark on the world.
For 80 years, Danish home store Illums Bolighus has been furnishing the homes of families across Scandinavia and Germany, building up a base of 250,000 loyalty members. And with the rise of ecommerce, it took the showroom online to cater for a 50-50 split in how, when, and where modern consumers shop.
“Commerce Cloud is helping us bring the in-store and online experience closer together to create memorable omnichannel shopping at scale,” said Kristian Friis-Hansen, IT and Operations Manager at Illums Bolighus. “The sky’s the limit when it comes to growth. We’re opening more stores and improving our ecommerce platform every day.”
But Salesforce isn’t just helping Illums Bolighus to scale, it’s helping the retailer stand apart from its competitors with an outstanding customer experience and content that transforms the showroom from a display into an inspiration.
"Commerce Cloud is helping us bring the in-store and online experience closer together to create memorable omnichannel shopping at scale."
IT and Operations Manager, Illums Bolighus
Table of Contents
1. Taking ecommerce to the next level.
Illums Bolighus first launched its webshop in 2012, but in the past few years, it needed to scale up and simplify operations to accommodate year-on-year growth.
“The project spanned multiple departments, from logistics to service. We don’t have an in-house team of developers, so we looked for a best of breed platform with great out-of-the-box functionality to support growth and accelerate our omnichannel strategy,” said Friis-Hansen.
Working with an implementation partner, Alpha Solutions, Illums Bolighus rolled out Commerce Cloud and integrated it with the ERP system and Service Cloud. The platform seamlessly supports ecommerce in four countries and multiple languages, which will make expanding into new regions easier in the future.
The Order Management System underpins the new logistics setup. Orders are automatically routed to the correct fulfilment centre or warehouse, and the customer receives a tracking number on dispatch and invoice generated via the integration with the ERP. If the item order requires additional communications – because it’s being manufactured, for example – the relevant team is notified so they can keep the customer in the loop.
“Previously, logistics used to be a slow, manual process. Orders came in via email and staff had to look up and collect the item, before bringing it to the operations centre for packing and shipping. Creating the invoice and sending update emails were done manually as well,” commented Friis-Hansen. “Now, everything is much more structured and automated.”
2. Freeing up more resources to run promotions.
This process isn’t just good news for logistics. It also frees up resources so the company can run more promotions – especially during peak periods such as the run up to Christmas. This was something that wasn’t possible previously, as Friis-Hansen explained: “We don’t compromise on quality. Without Salesforce, we couldn’t guarantee a great customer experience whilst simultaneously handling the surges in demand generated by promotions.”
Now, it’s a different story. The team can easily set up and run campaigns, the website can handle surges in traffic, and the third-party logistics centre can manage spikes in volume even up to a couple of days before Christmas.
Where once promotions were run manually and staff had to physically be in the office to launch them, they can now be planned in advance and scheduled, with all the accompanying web banners and splash features that go with them.
“Running promotions on the weekend used to mean our team was working unsociable hours, but now that’s a thing of the past,” said Friis-Hansen. “It’s a huge weight off my mind knowing we’ve got a secure, reliable platform that can handle high revenue generating activities like Black Friday. In the 18 months since we went live, it’s never been down – unlike our previous platform that seemed to always go down at the most inopportune moments!”
3. Nurturing long-term customer relationships.
As the team continues to develop the Salesforce platform, it plans to run more personalised campaigns for its loyalty members. Currently, when a customer signs up for the loyalty programme in store it triggers an automated welcome journey in Salesforce. In the future, members will receive more personalised campaigns and discounts. If they browse the website whilst logged in, for example, they’ll be able to see their unique discounts next to the original purchase price.
“Commerce Cloud is a much better fit for our business than our old solution. We’re only working with 30% of the features so far, and we’ve got plans in the pipeline to continue building long-term value,” Friis-Hansen added.
One such plan is to explore Einstein artificial intelligence for smart searches and product recommendations. The team will define KPIs to monitor the impact of these innovations on conversion rates and average order value.
Click and collect is also an important part of the omnichannel offering, and the retailer rolled out Experience Cloud to help employees manage these orders behind the scenes. The portal connects to the Order Management System and provides a hub for 250 staff to log in, accept orders, and get them packed and prepared for collection.
4. Empowering the service team with a single source of truth.
As Illums Bolighus has evolved over the years, so too has its customer service team. “When we ran logistics manually, we needed a bigger support team to handle customer cases,” said Friis-Hansen. “Now, we’ve got three full-time and two part-time employees using Service Cloud.”
This small team is well equipped to handle a large volume of cases by email and phone, whilst Live Chat provides automated responses to common queries. Where once agents had to monitor between three and five systems to get a full view of customers and orders, now they need only look in Service Cloud, and the team has eliminated duplicated records between Salesforce and its ERP system.
“Our customer service team in Denmark can handle everything. We have empowered them with full visibility of the customer history and orders so they can provide a fast response. We’re quite early in our implementation so we’re still optimising how we operate, but we’ve already seen an increase in our Net Promoter Score,” added Friis-Hansen. “We’re excited to start using all the data captured in Salesforce to help proactively shape the customer experience and get more predictive about their needs.”
