You recently won an Online Shopping Award – I imagine the mood is pretty jubilant at your premises!
Yes, we’re thrilled. We won the best bath category in the Sheerluxe Online Shopping Awards – they’re voted by the public so it’s the best endorsement you could get. We’re all about creating that perfect experience for our customers and it’s lovely to see them responding so positively.
What are your main target markets and demographics and how do you ensure you are meeting their customer service needs?
We actually have a wide range of ladies shopping with us, but our core segment comprises professional women, often with young children to look after. They have a keen interest in beauty, are very discerning but typically time poor. We carefully curate our offering with that in mind, have multiple points of contact for our customers, and are swift, responsive and always tailor our service to the individual. We are also incredibly keen on feedback – we really want people to talk to us and we’ll listen carefully and make changes to our approach accordingly. It’s always evolving and we embrace that.
Bath and Unwind have an active social media and digital presence. What impact has this had on your business, what channels are most successful for you and how do you intend to develop this into the future?
Social media is an integral part of our business – our customers are very savvy so we use a number of channels, predominantly Facebook and Twitter, to share exciting new products, offers and news with them. We find it invaluable in raising awareness of some of our amazing brands and in offering more of an insight into who we are as a company.
Also, it helps us gauge what our customers are interested in (via what they like and share) so we can offer them what they want. Lastly, we’re very focused on making women feel good about themselves so we use social to run competitions and giveaways where they might win something a little bit special. There’ll definitely be a bit more of a focus on that.
What prompted you to use outsourced contact centre services and in particular, WeAnswer’s?
Having such an extensive customer base means we need to be offering contact points that suit the requirements of each person that shops with us. This could be someone who needs a quiet evening when the kids are in bed to call, or someone who only has time at the weekend after a stressful week at work. We knew that to be able to offer this great service we had to choose a contact centre who shared our values and who we could trust to look after our customers.
In an increasingly digital age, how important do you feel telephone contact is for Bath and Unwind’s customer base and why?
Many of our customers still enjoy picking up the phone, whether it is for peace of mind or just to ask us more in-depth questions. People really do appreciate speaking to an actual person, and it allows us to give our service the all-important personal touch. We know it works because we regularly receive great feedback from our customers who call us. Even though email and chat channels are growing, we are still seeing a steady volume of phone contact from our customers.
What are your top tips for business efficiencies in retail, on and off-line?
In ecommerce, having a fulfilment operation that has an extremely low error rate is vital. This is not only paramount for our customer experience – which is the most important part of our business – but errors also have a significant cost that are hard to record but can really hit your bottom line.
What are Bath and Unwind’s plans for the future?
We’re currently in the middle of rebranding (something we’re very excited about) and that is really a continuation of our focus on our customer experience. It has always given us strong growth and we will continue to evolve along those lines.
