Living Edge transforms to provide bespoke journeys for all its customers

Living Edge is a leading destination for original and sustainable furniture, including timeless pieces from internationally renowned brands like Herman Miller. Its products are sold to consumers through its showrooms and website and it offers a more bespoke experience for businesses, architects, and designers. Living Edge is transforming to manage all of this on Salesforce and provide a more connected experience to customers online and offline.

James Morton, Chief Financial Officer at Living Edge, said the catalyst for this transformation was the need for more scalable IT. “In 2017, we recognised that our IT systems weren’t keeping pace with the growth of the business and we wanted to capitalise on the efficiencies that a more connected system could bring. What attracted us to Salesforce was the opportunity to alleviate all the admin pressures on our sales team and put customers at the centre of our universe,” said Morton.

The first phase of Living Edge’s transformation is now complete and has included the launch of a new ecommerce site on Commerce Cloud. Living Edge offered ecommerce before, but the site had limited product listings and didn’t cater to the needs of design professionals or businesses.

“Customers browsing for the home and customers browsing professionally have different needs and are looking for different products and information. With Commerce Cloud, we’ve been able to curate a digital experience that meets the needs of all our customers,” said Morton. “We’re also able to use customers’ browsing and transaction data to provide them with a personalised experience when they step into our showrooms.”

Living Edge launched its new site on Commerce Cloud with 20% more product listings than it had previously and featuring a more inspirational browsing experience. Customers can also easily switch between home and professional views to find the right information. In the first month of being live, the site’s conversion rate was 290% higher than the average for the three months prior. This translated to an 82% increase in revenue.

To support the sales team and provide a better experience to customers offline, Living Edge has also implemented Sales Cloud. One of the biggest pain points it’s addressed has been reporting. In the past, each sales rep had their own spreadsheet to track pipeline and this was then rolled up to one larger spreadsheet for the business. The was not only inefficient, but provided management with little visibility into sales activities and trends.

Now all opportunities are managed in Sales Cloud, providing a real-time view of pipeline and saving each of Living Edge’s 35 sales reps two to three hours per week. Living Edge is also able to capture information to personalise the customer experience and analyse sales performance.

“We spent so much time on pipeline reporting there was no time to look at things like how much time we were spending with customers or what led to opportunities being won or lost. Salesforce provides us with much greater transparency and better understanding of what’s happening in each market,” said Morton.

Living Edge plans to create more efficiencies by using CPQ to simplify quoting and is investigating a pilot of the new Order Management System integrating back to Commerce Cloud. The latter will enable business customers to reorder items like chairs or desks via the website rather than going through a sales rep. Living Edge also plans to introduce Service Cloud to manage the post-sales experience. This can be complicated for large projects and typically involves coordination with multiple suppliers. Using Service Cloud will help Living Edge to streamline this workflow and improve customer care.

Both Commerce Cloud and Sales Cloud were switched on during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing Living Edge with additional capabilities to serve customers. To help manage social distancing, for example, it moved to an appointment based model when reopening showrooms and enabled customers to book appointments through the website. It’s also used its website to showcase home office furniture and has started to talk to businesses about how they support employees at home. While people have adapted to working from the kitchen bench or dining table, employers need to ensure employee wellbeing and good ergonomics. Living Edge wants to partner with businesses to help solve this challenge and create safer work from home environments.

Living Edge has been quick to support its own employees through this time and transitioned everyone to home working within 48 hours in mid-March. While showrooms have reopened, many employees remain at home and the leadership team has focused on keeping everyone connected and informed through regular team updates. Those who have found themselves with a lighter workload at this time have been encouraged to update customer records in Salesforce, providing the business with better information to manage pipeline and personalise the customer experience. There’s even an internal competition whereby employees earn points for updating customer records and upskilling on Trailhead. This has contributed to the completion of 500 badges in Trailhead, a 20% average increase in account profile completeness across the board, and a 58% increase in the logging of calls and events with customers.

With everyone competing to win a new piece of furniture, the engagement has been amazing and will support Living Edge’s drive to make Salesforce its one platform for customer engagement. “The more we can move people away from spreadsheets and our ERP and get them onto Salesforce, the more agile and dynamic we can be,” said Morton.