LK Bennett went live with their GrapheneHC integration just before
Black Friday in 2021. We caught up with Digital & Marketing Director, Zoe Donovan, to ask how things were going...
What was the problem you had?
“We had been using our previous merchandising tool for about 6 years, and the rationale for our move was it had been implemented before my time so I inherited it, but when I started using it I felt like the implementation had never been totally finished. It was quite a powerful tool that we weren't doing anywhere near as much as we could with and to get the full potential out of it we needed to spend a lot of money on the technology, and we would need to continuously spend a lot of money on the technology every year to keep it up to date.
We also needed to spend a lot of time and resource on using the tool, constantly setting things up and testing different things, and those were two things we didn't have.
It was just a headache - no one really understood how it worked.”
Why did you choose GrapheneHC?
"The move to GrapheneHC has been part of a larger website upgrade for LK Bennett that has seen an increase in conversion and contributed to 20%+ year on year revenue growth. But one of my main goals is focussed on post sale:
I talk about trying to reduce avoidable returns, with online shopping you're always going to get returns. The question is which are the returns that we could have avoided because we did something smarter up front and helped the customer find the right product the first time. A lot of customers who've returned items are disappointed as they were buying something that they thought they were going to love and going to keep, and the fact that they've sent it back means that they've had a disappointing and brand damaging experience that could have been avoided. Reducing returns, even by just 1%, saves an enormous amount of lost revenue, profit and cost along with protecting our brand reputation and customer’s experience. GrapheneHC and it’s ability to
control product display sequencing throughout the entire site, and change that display sequencing dependant on
different personas and onsite triggers really helps to make sure we are finding the right product, first time and reducing the number of avoidable returns."
How was the integration process?
"I'm extremely happy with how the integration went, it was very smooth, we connected relatively easily through the API’s and throughout the integration everyone involved commented on how supportive the Advanced Commerce team were and how they were a joy to work with, quick to respond and how it genuinely feels like a true partnership.
The biggest short term gain for us is really having a tool that is the right level for a business of our size without compromising on the quality of the
technology, and the team so far are so much more engaged with GrapheneHC than they ever were with our previous tool.
They can have a level of automation that means they can just step away on the categories that we don't have time to get into the nitty gritty with, whilst categories we want to be super visual and curated like ‘New In’ can be controlled really easily. We now have a tool that is still extremely powerful, but is much lighter weight for the team to use in terms of the amount of time they need to invest, which is absolutely one of our key objectives.”
Would you recommend GrapheneHC?
“I would absolutely recommend GrapheneHC and would give it 5 out of 5 for a business like ours that wants easy to use, enterprise grade software.”
