Rebag unified its online and in-store shopping experiences to delight customers with Intercom
With Geronimo Chala, Chief Consumer Officer at Rebag
first-response time
higher conversion rates
increase in NPS
Rebag is an e-commerce platform and retailer that buys, sells, and trades luxury handbags and accessories. The team needed a communications platform that would enable them to merge their traditional retail and e-commerce shopping experiences and optimize every stage of the customer journey, from checkout conversions, to ongoing engagement, to support.
Geronimo Chala, Chief Consumer Officer at Rebag, is focused on creating a strong end-to-end experience for their customers, whether they’re shopping in a physical store or online. “We wanted to merge these two worlds and make it different from what a lot of other retailers are doing,” he says. “What we’re beginning to really understand is that experience-driven businesses are seeing substantially more growth and profitability because they’re retaining their customers at higher rates and improving client lifetime value. So, it was really important to us to have a communications platform that could help us create an end-to-end experience with the customer at the forefront.”
With Intercom, Rebag has enhanced their tech stack by adding in-context messaging to their communication suite, and can balance personalization with efficiency. They use the platform to power communications at every stage of the customer lifecycle, leveraging Intercom’s Engage and Support solutions to meet customers where they are to nurture them through the buying journey and provide stellar support. “We know that customers want a unique and memorable experience, so partnering with Intercom was the right decision for our team because it has allowed us to think big and deliver that in a seamless manner."
Tackling the problems to be solved
When Rebag set out to optimize their customer experience, they wanted to tackle a number of challenges that many retail businesses face:
Bridging the divide between in-store and online shopping experiences.
Finding a customer engagement solution that would create a great experience for both customers and employees.
Scaling customer communications and managing inbound conversation volume without having to drastically increase headcount.
Prior to Intercom, Rebag’s primary communication channel was email. The team found that it limited their opportunities to meet customers where they are, so they wanted to leverage omnichannel messaging to drive increased engagement. “We needed a platform that would allow us to work in the moment and reach out to customers in the right places to most effectively engage with them, like when they’re on our website, which we couldn’t do with email,” says Geronimo.
Integrating the customer experience
With Intercom, Rebag is able to create strong experiences and meet customers at the right time, in the right place, and with the right message to effectively engage them. Geronimo explains that a big part of building these experiences is having first-party data seamlessly synced across their core systems. “We’ve integrated Intercom with some tools that we’ve built internally, as well as some others like our POS system, Shopify, our ticketing system, Zendesk, our CRM retail platform, Endear, and our business development platform, Salesforce,” he says.
The benefit of using Intercom side by side with other point solutions is that it gives you both live insight, when customers are on our website, and offline insight, when they leave and we need to re-engage them at a later stage.
“Intercom has enhanced our communications tech stack and opened up more channels that we can use to communicate with our customers, like chat, SMS, and email. The benefit of using Intercom side by side with other point solutions is that it gives you both live insight, when customers are on our website, and offline insight, when they leave and we need to re-engage them at a later stage.”
Implementing a unified platform to support and engage customers
“We use Intercom in many ways – as a support system, an engagement platform, and on the sales side, we leverage it to improve customers’ lifetime value and the length of time we can retain them,” says Geronimo. “It’s brought all of our teams together so we can create strong, consistent experiences for our customers.” With Intercom’s Support solution, the team is keeping median first-response time to under a minute and has increased their NPS by 15 points. The Engage solution has enabled the team to drive increased sales, as well as heightened engagement across the lifecycle.
One thing that really stood out to us with Intercom was the speed and simplicity of the platform.
“One thing that really stood out to us with Intercom was the speed and simplicity of the platform,” says Geronimo. "When you want to provide every customer with a luxurious, best-in-class experience, efficiency and speed are critical. And they’re not only critical for our customers, but also for our employees. The happier our team is, the easier it is for them to delight our customers. So, Intercom was that one platform that tied all of those pieces together for us. We fell in love with it.”
Building an end-to-end digital journey
As a company that specializes in luxury goods, Rebag wanted their customer journey to reflect that commitment to luxury. The team combines powerful automation with personalized messaging to ensure that customers’ journeys are tailored to their exact needs.
Here’s how Rebag uses Intercom to drive results at every stage of the customer journey:
Making a strong first impression to drive conversions
From the very first moment a customer visits Rebag’s website, the Intercom Messenger pops up to greet them. Based on the path a visitor takes, the messaging becomes more personalized to their needs to offer them assistance or more information about particular products they’re looking for. The team leverages Intercom’s visual campaign builder, Series, to orchestrate their marketing messaging, and Custom Bots to pre-qualify prospective customers and collect valuable data about what they’re interested in.
"With Series, we can create really granular messaging flows. We’ve seen customers converting at higher rates and being more satisfied with their experiences as a result of being able to engage with them in such a personal way,” says Geronimo. “We attribute that to Intercom’s flexibility in terms of being able to build event-based triggers and enrich that with data from our other systems.”
Continuing the conversation through ongoing engagement
When it comes to nurturing customers, Rebag sends targeted messages based on how likely they are to make a purchase in the near or long term. “Some of our series are compact because we know that we have a high chance of getting a customer back to our site and see great conversion there in a short window,” says Geronimo. “Our longer series are designed for customers who are in the education period. We know that it’s going to take a little bit more time, so we nurture them with messages that are relevant to their needs and use Intercom’s analytics to better understand where they are in their journey.”
Shoppers aren’t likely to stay on one website for hours, so we leverage Intercom to meet them where they are – be that on the site while they’re shopping, or afterwards with follow-up messages to re-engage them.
Rebag can design messaging flows in Series that combine a number of different message types, such as outbound messages, posts, push notifications, and more. By adding conditional logic, these messages can be automatically sent to customers at the right stage in their buying journey to have the maximum impact. “We know that our window to engage with customers when they’re on our site is short,” says Geronimo. “Shoppers aren’t likely to stay on one website for hours, so we leverage Intercom to meet them where they are – be that on the site while they’re shopping, or afterwards with follow-up messages to re-engage them.”
Powering in-context support, when and where it’s needed
Rebag believes that providing a luxury experience comes down to providing excellent support, which is why they have the Intercom Messenger implemented across their website to enable customers to contact the Support team, or self-serve using Custom Bots and Articles. “Intercom empowers our customers to solve questions or potential issues that they might have at any given time,” says Geronimo. “Our customers want answers right away, and Intercom allows us to provide them with fast responses, while still minimizing the workload for our team.”
Unifying the physical and digital experiences
If a customer has interacted with Rebag online, the information collected through Series and Custom Bots is synced with Rebag’s in-store CRM, Endear, so the retail team has the information they need to tailor each customer's experience. When shoppers arrive in Rebag’s stores, they’re handed iPads so they can scan and favorite items as they browse, and then easily continue shopping online at a later stage. This information being transferred between the retail and digital teams results in a consistent, delightful experience for the customer. “Intercom is a massively powerful data consumption tool for us at Rebag,” says Geronimo. “And we’re beginning to see the impact this has on a lot of the key metrics that help drive our business.”
Our conversion rates are just astronomical. We’re seeing that the conversion rate with Intercom is anywhere from 3.5 to 5.5 times higher than the traditional e-commerce website, which is quite astonishing.
Driving over 5x more conversions to boost the bottom line
Since implementing Intercom’s customer communications platform, Rebag has seen impressive results across the board. “Intercom has been nothing but fantastic for our business,” says Geronimo. “Our conversion rates are just astronomical. We’re seeing that the conversion rate with Intercom is anywhere from 3.5 to 5.5 times higher than the traditional e-commerce website, which is quite astonishing. We’re also able to maintain a median first-response time of under a minute, which keeps our customers happy as we’re able to respond and resolve their issues quickly. Our engagement levels have definitely increased and our retention has improved since we added Intercom to our tech stack.” The team has also increased their NPS score by a staggering 15 points.
I definitely say, if you don’t have Intercom, you’re not ready for the new world.
“I’d recommend Intercom to anyone who is looking to create a unique experience for your customer, but also have the flexibility to really personalize that experience – both in the digital and the physical world,” says Geronimo. “I definitely say, if you don’t have Intercom, you’re not ready for the new world.”