HIGH INVOLVEMENT RETAIL

How Tyles improveed their efficiency and customer experience with Pexip Engage

"After implementing Pexip Engage we clearly saw huge efficiency gains on both sides, customers and advisors."

Fabienne Royaux, Company Owner

Company Name
TYLES

Industry
HIGH INVOLVEMENT RETAIL

Location
BELGIUM

Belgian ceramic tile wholesaler, Tyles, provides a careful selection of ceramic tiles from high-quality suppliers. Tyles focuses on creating long-term relationships with their partners and visits every tile manufacturer they work with on-site. That guarantees that Tyles offers the best ceramic tiles on the market with a wide selection from Spain and Italy (the traditional tile countries) as they have been doing for the past 44 years.

"For high involvement retail, the convenience of working by appointment has been discovered by many consumers and will continue to be part of their buyer journeys"- Fabienne Royaux Company Owner,Tyles

Transforming from Wholesale to B2C

2 years ago, the new brand name ‘Tyles’ was born and a marketing department was set up, which is more focused on B2C, to market the Tyles brand and support the underlying dealer network. These dealers are largely independent and focus mainly on local marketing whereas the marketing department supports the Tyles brand nationally.

Over time, the biggest change is that in addition to selling to professionals such as dealers and installers, the brand Tyles now also has exposure to the end consumer thanks to our marketing efforts. The demand for an online appointment platform was triggered because of increased interest from customers and dealers to visit Tyles' showrooms.

The most important one is the flagship store in Zellik, where a lot of the existing dealer network send their customers. In Zellik they have their complete product range to show to customers and offer expert advice. The showroom advisors receive these customers and support them in their decision making process after which they are directed back to the dealer for next steps and installation.

"The purpose of using Pexip Engage was to streamline the appointment-making flow because there is quite a bit of administrative work involved when booking appointments in the traditional way. Efficiency and time saving were the primary drivers for choosing Pexip Engage." - Fabienne Royaux Company Owner,Tyles

Life before Pexip Engage

Through one of the Pexip Engage mailings we got in touch when working by appointment was on top of the covid agenda. That mailing contained a relevant use case for us and it was clear we needed to evaluate this further. After careful consideration we chose to work with Pexip Eng.

We used to manually follow up and confirm every appointment request. This of course comes with back and forth communicating which was very tedious for our employees and a suboptimal experience for our customers.

Booking an appointment for a high involvement purchase as a customer was an inconvenient experience. The challenge was getting in touch to confirm an appointment after customers filled in a form, which mostly happened in the evening or weekends. At these times our showrooms are closed.

For our showroom advisors, this proved to be an inefficient process. Before Pexip Engage, our showroom advisors were forced to do the appointment administration instead of actually helping people or working on open leads.

Pexip Engage increases the efficiency of the sales process

One of the advantages of working with Pexip Engage is the extra questions in the plug-in during a customer’s booking process. This allows us to track referrals by asking questions such as 'have you been referred by a professional' and if so 'by whom'. Referrals from dealers/installers are an important part of our business.

This way, the salesperson is informed before the appointment, which is also an important advantage for preparing conversations and keeping track of lead generation data. Some dealers/installers sometimes even already book an appointment with the customer in the flagship store when the customer is in their showroom, with a note to inform the salesperson so the conversation can run even smoother and be prepared.

One of the typical problems in a showroom is that it is always the same salespeople who go in first or handle the mailbox with appointments. Using Pexip Engage also allows us to assign showroom advisors at random to our customers ensuring that the balance of appointments is almost perfectly distributed among the different advisors. That makes life easier for the sales manager and our advisors as they can now plan their day more easily.

"It also has the advantage for sales people that if the majority of showroom visits are made by appointment, they can plan and organise their day more efficiently. If it were up to my sales team, they would prefer to work by appointment only. "- Fabienne Royaux Company Owner,Tyles

Onboarding process

The experience with Pexip Engage during the setup went very smoothly. Based on other customers' plug-ins, we had a clear view of how we wanted our configuration to look. The sandbox is also well set up and explains itself once you know in which direction you want to go. Certainly not a difficult environment to set up and super flexible to adjust as needed.

During the integration process into the website, the offered documentation was very clear. This ensured that our communication agency did not need a developer but that the support team could handle this directly. Looking to the future, Tyles feels that Appointments are here to stay and the easier it is for customers to book appointments, such as through Pexip Engage, the more people will use them.