UK bed specialist, Bensons for Beds, has utilised the power of product experience to create cohesive, informative customer experiences designed specifically to support its cross-channel buying journey in partnership with Akeneo.
With an ongoing focus on delivering growth following the turbulence of COVID-19, Bensons for Beds wanted to optimise its online capabilities in recognition of the vital discovery and research role the website plays for its customers when choosing the right product for their sleep needs.
With customers often only purchasing new beds or mattresses every seven to eight years on average, Bensons for Beds recognised that, by the time a customer comes to make a new purchase, they often need to be re-educated in product attributes, benefits, and how new sleep technologies have evolved since their last purchase. This need for re-education highlighted the importance of providing high-quality product information to help guide customers to the right choice, and the need for product information to flow seamlessly between digital and physical channels, ensuring customers are supported by staff in-store, where they can try and experience the products in real life.
Graham Wilson, director of digital & omnichannel at Bensons for Beds, explains: “It’s our job to find the best mattress for our customers and, in terms of channel, we try and get as many of our customers in-store as possible. The Bensons For Beds website is about research and consideration and we need to provide that bible of information to help customers narrow down (products) to help with their decision-making process.”
With an extensive catalogue of products covering mattresses, divan bases, bedheads and soft goods, offering multiple product attributes and configurations to accommodate customer needs and preferences, Bensons for Beds needed a product information solution that could unify multiple data points to create cohesive and information-rich omnichannel product experiences. The team chose to partner with Akeneo due to the agility and flexibility of its solution – ultimately improving customer journeys, both online and in-store.
“Having that consistent experience between channels is incredibly powerful and helps us create attachment opportunities, which in turn helps drive our average order value (AOV). It also helps build trust between colleagues and customers as ultimately people buy from people, so having content and assets that support and enable those relationships is essential,” commented Wilson.
“And for our in-store colleagues, they can’t possibly know every single combination our products can come in, so by using the website as the central product information reference point, it really enables the omnichannel piece and provides a single source of truth to ensure a great customer experience,” he added.
Bensons for Beds products are curated into Good/Better/Best subsets with Akeneo’s PIM enabling different product experiences depending on the product type to ensure higher price point items are fully enriched to include all the information required to support the sale. Akeneo’s SKU generator allows the Bensons for Beds team to speed up the creation of products in the PIM to then allow data enrichment, getting all created products to market as soon as possible. Control fields allow the retailer to slice and dice information based on what is relevant to the audience depending on which channel they are seeing it, while metadata increases visibility and onsite product search. The Bensons for Beds merchandising team now have the power to create new product variations and options without reliance on the IT team, empowering them to be more flexible and vary the range going forward, changing the way Bensons for Beds merchandises and manages the site.
Justin Thomas, VP Sales – EMEA North at Akeneo, commented: “Product experience is the keystone for commerce and foundational for creating meaningful customer experiences that build long-term connections with shoppers to drive conversions and loyalty. Bensons for Beds is a brilliant example of a retailer who understands the power of product information to provide consistency and impact at each customer touchpoint, even though each channel has a different role throughout the buying journey.”
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