Why experience, not ecommerce, is driving King Living's digital revamp

When Covid disruptions shuttered showrooms, this luxury retailer drove a renewal in its digital experience, and it’s now paying dividends

Although King Living had an online presence for many years, it was a brochure-style website. Digital functioned as a home for the product guides rather than a separate but related experience for the premium furniture designer and manufacturer.  

“The focus was always on showrooms because the product is very personalised. It’s made to order. That’s the core of the business,” King Living chief experience officer, Vanja Stace, told CMO.  

Since its inception in 1977, King Living has grown to include 25 showrooms across six websites and seven countries. Product personalisation has always been the core through this direct-to-consumer retail experience - until the pandemic.  

From digital brochure to digital destination  

The global crisis gave King Living an urgency to “understand what omnichannel really means and to stop relying solely on showrooms” to reach targets and budgets, Stace said. At the outset, the immediate need was converting the website, which hadn’t been ecommerce, mobile-first or customer experience-focused, into a shoppable destination.  

To do this, the team took a minimum viable product (MVP) approach, adding features as lockdowns prevented the showrooms from being the sales destination. Having joined the retailer after this initial phase, Stace realised it was important to learn more about how the website was changing the showroom experience once things opened up again.  

“I spent time in showrooms sitting and watching customers being sold to by our retail team and really trying to understand why we do so well in showrooms,” she said.  

With the brand’s point of difference how it sells the products, Stace started thinking about how to bring that experience online. She realised being in a considered category with a significant showroom influence presented an opportunity to replicate as much of that as possible online while stoking that discovery stage.  

“It was no longer just having a shoppable website or making it better or easier to transact digitally; it was how to support this product premium product, which has a long consideration phase,” Stace said.  

To do this, the team started at the end and stepped back to identify the gaps and reconfigure the site to fuel consideration and do some of the work of the showroom.  

“I had to ask: ‘How do I actually achieve that? What do I need?’ I realised I can't make any improvements without first having data, experience data, about what is currently happening,” Stace explained. “What are the opportunities? And where are we actually failing? You know, where are we just basically leaving money on the table?  

“I also needed some insight, I needed to optimise and I needed to experiment a little bit. Then I needed to have a clearer idea of what to action.”  

In short, Stace needed data to bolster the business case for investing in new digital tools. The basic tools could only show so much, such as where there was a drop-off in clicks or user traffic, for example. But it didn’t explain why and how to shift things to stop this from happening.  

Tuning into digital experience metrics  

With a background in fashion and inventory-based digital retailing, Stace could see King didn’t need a classic ecommerce approach focused on short timeliness, sometimes impulse decision-making and fast conversion. “Our focus is on education and it’s on comparison,” she said.  

The challenge was how to discover the unknowns when it came to the brand’s website and customer drop-offs, dead zones or poor experience. Tapping digital experience analytics outfit, Contentsquare, Stace wanted to better understand the user experience and navigation paths across King Living’s website.  

Vanja StaceCredit: King Living
Vanja Stace


A case in point is a change in a navigation menu prior to this, which actually didn’t suit the desktop-based search experience of potential customers. As Stace explained: “Because it’s such a considered purchase, much of our discovery, and a lot of the conversion, still happens on desktop.  

“We noticed through recordings using Contentsquare that customers will sit on a product page for quite a while and circle parts of the page, like they're showing it to someone. The business understands now that desktop is very important for King, and the decisions and considerations are made with other people in the room as well.  

“We need to present all of our products so they can be found very easily, and we need to present them in a way that makes sense to everybody in the decision-making pool.”  

In addition, recordings show people switch through different tabs on the website and other websites. “We can see a short burst of inactivity, and then that same customer resuming the session. They've gone to a tab that's open we believe on a competitor’s site,” Stace continued.  

“We've overlaid this in a similar way where we can see upstream and downstream. We know they're researching. They have an investment, where they want to spend a considerable amount of money on a product that will last 25 years, and they're doing the research. We need to help them in that.”  

Putting the customer first  

Valuable data derived from its website analytics tool also enabled the team to put the customer first based on what’s really happening on the website. The impact is showing up in the showrooms.  

“We can help the customer download the product card, understand all the benefits and then go into a showroom and take a shorter time to convert,” Stace said. “We're doing more business because we’re taking less time to sell. The website is very much part of that omnichannel experience, but what's unique here is we're not just focused on selling on the site.”  

It’s not all about the technology behind the scenes. Since her appointment, Stace and the company have added roles such as UX and UI internally. With native integration on its website, King has also used a test-and-learn approach, in one case seeing a 27 per cent increase in conversion through its A/B testing that it then rolled out as an update to the website.  

Further quick wins include improving the navigation menu. “The week after we went live, we saw our navigation click rate, so people interacting with the desktop menu, was up by 223 per cent,” Stace noted.  

More improvements followed. Its updated navigation received 363 per cent more clicks and there was a 15 per cent reduction in site exits, something the brand had previously never put together. An overall uplift and conversion of 21 per cent ensued.  

“It has allowed us to demonstrate to the wider business just what the customer is looking for,” Stace said.  

It’s also enabled King to reduce customer effort scores. “We saw 41 per cent more users reach the product categories and 67 per cent more users reach the product pages,” she said.  

“Those numbers continue to grow because we’re doing other things with the journey and trying to remove unnecessary steps before customers get to see products.”  

King Living’s overall goal is to have an omnichannel, seamless experience in what’s now an experience-led business with an eye on future expansion. Customising its offering for different markets and customers as it grows is a key next step.  

“I’m now the chief experience officer because the business realises there needs to be an experience champion in the company on a global level, someone who isn't only focusing on online, but is focusing on the customer throughout all of our touchpoints,” Stace added.

Don’t miss out on the wealth of insight and content provided by CMO A/NZ and sign up to our weekly CMO Digest newsletters and information services here.  

You can also follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, follow our regular updates via CMO Australia's Linkedin company page   

 

 

 

 

 

Join the newsletter!

Or

Sign up to gain exclusive access to email subscriptions, event invitations, competitions, giveaways, and much more.

Membership is free, and your security and privacy remain protected. View our privacy policy before signing up.

Error: Please check your email address.
Show Comments

Latest Videos

More Videos

More Brand Posts

What are Chris Riddell's qualifications to talk about technology? What are the awards that Chris Riddell has won? I cannot seem to find ...

Tareq

Digital disruption isn’t disruption anymore: Why it’s time to refocus your business

Read more

Enterprisetalk

Mark

CMO's top 10 martech stories for the week - 9 June

Read more

Great e-commerce article!

Vadim Frost

CMO’s State of CX Leadership 2022 report finds the CX striving to align to business outcomes

Read more

Are you searching something related to Lottery and Lottery App then Agnito Technologies can be a help for you Agnito comes out as a true ...

jackson13

The Lottery Office CEO details journey into next-gen cross-channel campaign orchestration

Read more

Thorough testing and quality assurance are required for a bug-free Lottery Platform. I'm looking forward to dependability.

Ella Hall

The Lottery Office CEO details journey into next-gen cross-channel campaign orchestration

Read more

Blog Posts

Marketing prowess versus the enigma of the metaverse

Flash back to the classic film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Television-obsessed Mike insists on becoming the first person to be ‘sent by Wonkavision’, dematerialising on one end, pixel by pixel, and materialising in another space. His cinematic dreams are realised thanks to rash decisions as he is shrunken down to fit the digital universe, followed by a trip to the taffy puller to return to normal size.

Liz Miller

VP, Constellation Research

Why Excellent Leadership Begins with Vertical Growth

Why is it there is no shortage of leadership development materials, yet outstanding leadership is so rare? Despite having access to so many leadership principles, tools, systems and processes, why is it so hard to develop and improve as a leader?

Michael Bunting

Author, leadership expert

More than money talks in sports sponsorship

As a nation united by sport, brands are beginning to learn money alone won’t talk without aligned values and action. If recent events with major leagues and their players have shown us anything, it’s the next generation of athletes are standing by what they believe in – and they won’t let their values be superseded by money.

Simone Waugh

Managing Director, Publicis Queensland

Sign in