Technology major IBM said City Furniture, a furniture provider in South Florida, has launched three MobileFirst for iOS apps for iPad Pro — Sales Assist, Payment, and Finance — to support in-store shoppers.
Nearly 400 store associates across 15 City Furniture showrooms, and 12 Ashley Furniture HomeStore showrooms, in south Florida, will use these apps that will equip associates with insights to deliver a more efficient, personalized shopping experience for retail customers.
The investment in enterprise apps is part of City Furniture’s long-term strategy to transform its businesses model with less emphasis on transactions to focusing more on customer relationships and engagement.
Earlier, City Furniture store associates recorded information manually, spent time walking around the showroom to find products and created invoices using a deskbound system.
ACHIEVEMENTS
# Growing the average purchase order per customer over five percent per customer with Sales Assist
# Increased average in-home warranty service by more than 18 percent, and average stain protection service by over 17 percent with Sales Assist
# Reduced average discounts, which cuts into profits and sales associates meeting their monthly sales goals and quotas, by almost 60 percent
# Cuts the time in half that it takes for a customer to select the product, choose services and delivery, then make a payment or apply for credit
# Since customers can now see photos of products in their cart before they pay, they can visually confirm the accuracy of their order, resulting in fewer credit or invoice rewrites
Thanks to its enterprise mobility programs, City Furniture store associates have real-time access to the more than 8,000 SKUs with images, product information, colors, styles, and customer profiles that can be used for enhancing customer experience and reducing the time it takes to close a sale.
“By developing these customized apps in collaboration with IBM and Apple, employees have the right tools to personalize recommendations, make payments, and schedule delivery all from the showroom floor,” said Keith Koenig, president, City Furniture.
City Furniture worked with IBM to create apps, built using Swift, that are customized to support the needs of its store associates. The three iOS apps work together, integrated with City Furniture’s commerce solutions, to give store associates quick access to relevant real-time data while assisting customers.
“Armed with iOS apps, City Furniture associates can immediately tap into the right relevant product and customer data in near real time, without disrupting customer engagement, to bring the highest level of personalization and service to shoppers while in the physical store for a more interactive, efficient shopping experience,” said Laurence Haziot, IBM’s Global Managing Director and General Manager for the Consumer Industry.
City Furniture is using IBM’s cloud platform Bluemix to link new applications with the company’s existing applications and data.
IBM plans to evolve the apps with City Furniture to connect with the retailer’s existing CRM system and analytics so store associates can more easily follow up with direct marketing for prospective customers based on data from prior purchases and interactions.
