Learn how this sustainable furniture brand shortened its sales cycle from 4 weeks to 4 days.
Challenge: long sales cycles
As a premium furniture company, woodboom's bestseller is a €1,500 bed, a premium-priced product that needs some explaining.
Before buying, its customers asked an average of 7 questions, mostly via email. This could easily take 2-4 weeks.
Many potential buyers got lost on the way and ended up choosing different, more accessible solutions. However, a strength of woodboom as a Berlin-based, family-owned business has always been the customer-centric style of communication and the ability to convince and win back customers with empathetic conversations. Email and website did not seem to be the right channels to maintain these close connections in the long run.
Goals: grow business in a human way
charles approached Woodboom with its vision to merge conversation and conversion.
We were confident, woodboom could bring marketing, sales and service to a new level with WhatsApp, delivering exceptional customer experiences while requiring less effort from the founders.
Mischa and his team loved the idea of using their biggest strengths to grow their business in an empathetic way. This enabled them to scale the number of potential customers going into a consultation while maintaining the high service level without much additional effort.
Results: 4 weeks to 4 days
WhatsApp finally enabled woodboom to make use of its unique ability to build lasting and valuable customer relationships.
They reach their customers right in their daily habits and thus are able to cut their sales cycle to 2-4 days. At the same time, they were able to improve conversion rates by delivering exceptional service and timely replies. Eventually, WhatsApp became woodbooms #1 sales channel with over 70% of purchases initiated via chat.
How they did it
1. Website chat-ins
On Woodboom’s website, they implemented touchpoints for opt-ins via buttons, bubbles and articles that lead customers into a WhatsApp chat.
They're branded as the chance to chat with the founder Mischa.
2. Sales conversation in chat
Customers are directly passed on into WhatsApp where woodboom’s agents are trained to sell their products on a very personal level.
The main reason for abandoned carts is lack of information before making a decision, so employees are making sure that no question remains unanswered.
3. After-sales service
After a successful purchase, order confirmations, tracking links and helpful information concerning the product are sent to the customers so they always has full transparency about his delivery.
4. Reengage and build community
In the sales process, helpful information about the customer is stored in the charles platform.
That way, agents can proactively reach out in a very personal atmosphere and really make a difference.
Woodboom unlocked the potential to scale further towards an end-to-end usage of WhatsApp. After the success of the marketing use case, the vision is a further rollout towards a commerce-driven solution with marketing, service and sales in chat.
