Clothing, accessories and homeware retailer French Connection says multichannel retailing is key to its strategy. It supports customers by offering high-quality service across a range of channels, from digital and social media to the telephone and email.
The company has a clear focus on customer care and support through, for example, a recently added new customer relationship management (CRM) system. In its latest full-year results, to 31 January 2016, it said this system would “enable us to communicate better with our customers through a more personalised approach.” It added: “We have already started to see the benefits of this feed through and expect this to increase during the current year.”
It frames multichannel as part of its customer service, stating on its investor website that this area is a clear focus for them. “We will continue to invest in the people and systems to support this growth opportunity to ensure our customers can shop with us however they wish and get the very best multichannel experience,” it says.
As French Connection improves the service it offers via the internet, more of its sales are moving online. In 2015, almost a quarter (23%) of its sales took place there. Half-year results to July 31 2016 showed sales migrating further online as French Connection reported 26.5% of retail revenue taking place via ecommerce. Half of those sales (50%) took place on mobile and tablet devices, suggesting a successful m-commerce strategy.
InternetRetailing research shows that French Connection boasts impressive customer service. Customer queries sent over Facebook were dealt with in under an hour, and phone queries resolved in less than one minute. Emails were answered on average in 2h 59s. Queries were met with high-quality responses and careful service.
The retailer is particularly active on Twitter, where its account features the largest number of ‘Liked’ tweets of any Top500 retailer, at 6,440. This may be to do with its strong counter-cultural brand, which helps it to stand out from the competition online; its notorious ‘FCUK’ logo, for example, is also used as its Twitter handle.