Case study: Freedom Furniture uses data to gain customer trust

Australian retailer Freedom Furniture brought its customer data from its online and brick-and-mortar stores together to get a deeper understanding of its customers.

Jason Piggott, general manager –  marketing at Freedom Furniture told Digital Nation how they wanted to gain more of their customer’s trust.

“When you buy a sofa and you do it once every seven or eight years. It is not like it's a category that you truly understand all the ins and outs of,” he said.

“We definitely had a challenge there around winning consumer trust at the end of the day and we had to address that.”

Piggott said the furniture brand also had all these disparate systems in play around measuring satisfaction or the customer journey.

“It's a real need to sort of unify those and democratise the data out to our teams,” he said.

Through implementing Qualtrics three years ago they were able to democratise their data and have seen two major results.

Firstly, Piggott said Freedom Furniture has seen an increase in store traffic and web traffic.

“Over those three years, we've increased our NPS by 10 points, customer repurchase is at an all-time high. We've grown our MyFreedom loyalty membership by nearly 40 percent,” he said.

“It's been double-digit sales growth, particularly over the past two years and we continue to see that today.”

Piggott said the brand has a new ethos around customer experience that is embedded in the organisation.

“It's not just a metric or a saying that sits in the leadership team or the support office, it is owned by the whole business. It's that cultural piece that's the real difference at the end of the day,” he said.

“Maybe we can't achieve all those quantifiable numbers over the full journey with Qualtrics. But what we will have achieved is an absolute change in the culture of the business that puts the focus on the customer and removing those pain points and making sure it's this exceptional customer service.”

He added the real change has been winning customers' trust back both in-store, online and when they are delivering products to their customers.

Piggott said the staff at Freedom Furniture have been empowered by having live access to customer data.

“[Our staff] are able to see what's going on, what scores they're getting and we are disseminated right down to the individual salesperson level. Plus, they are also rewarded at the individual salesperson level for results,” he said.

“But we do use the programme as a carrot, not as a stick at the end of the day, that is important as well.”

Piggott explained from day one, this overhaul was about improving the company’s focus on the customer, putting the customer at the heart of the business, and not as a management tool to disincentivise people on the shop floor.

“It was about that constant improvement, constant reflection on things that we can lift our game on and that's how we're using our voice of the customer program at the end of the day,” he ended.