Focus on Superior Content Drives Customer Experience at Williams-Sonoma

Telling a product story in an effective, engaging is one of the many ways that Williams-Sonoma leverages superior content to drive an engaging and impactful customer experience.

Williams-Sonoma CEO Laura Alber talked about this point during the company’s recent third-quarter earnings call.

“For more than 60 years, we’ve been leaders in customer experience which began in our first Williams-Sonoma store with our founder, Chuck Williams, who served every customer with passion and care,” Alber explained. “And since then, his attention to the customer has become deeply embedded in our culture and a part of who we are today, a multichannel, multi-brand retailer that continues to deliver superior customer service and high-quality differentiated products. Our high-touch customer service platform is comprised of several key components. We have a multichannel model with an experiential retail base that gives our customers the ability to touch and see our products, together with the convenience of our established content-rich e-commerce presence.”

Alber added: “Our redesigned product page experience integrates this content in a way that allows us to better tell the story of our products and differentiate ourselves in the market. We’ll be testing this new experience in Q4 and we'll be iteratively rolling it out through the quarter and next year.”

Williams-Sonoma’s multi-brand portfolio offers its customers proprietary high-quality merchandise which addresses a range of demographics, lifestyles, aesthetics, and customer life journey.

“We have a comprehensive database of approximately 60 million households across our brands, which enables us to deliver personalized relevant messaging to our customers” Alber said. “We have a vertically integrated supply chain with direct sourcing and regionalized distribution centers to ensure that every piece of furniture is of the highest quality and delivered to our customers in a superior manner. We believe the combination of all these elements establishes a truly differentiated platform that is a core competitive advantage against mass retailers.”

During the third quarter, Williams-Sonoma launched its first sizable test of addressable TV with West Elm’s House Proud TV commercial, which combines the targeting and measurability of our traditional direct marketing with a compelling storytelling strength of video.

“We filed this commercial with distribution across digital, print, social, and targeted television” Alber said. “We also partnered with Facebook on its launch of Collection ads which brings to life our catalog on social media. Meanwhile, our content-rich personalized email campaigns continue to drive improvement in customer engagement metrics and overall sales. Our investments in digital innovation and cross-brand services, as well as continued optimization of our supply chain, position us to further differentiate our business and to deliver long-term gains in market share and profitable growth. Our strategic areas of focus on innovation and operational excellence are underpinned by our continued vision to create a high-touch customer service platform that is transformational for the home furnishings industry.”

Evan Magliocca, brand marketing manager for Baseman Insights & Marketing, told Loyalty360 that Williams-Sonoma’s focus on a rich customer experience and superior content is paramount for an industry geared toward higher AUR products such as home goods and furniture.

“Customers need to be able to touch and feel their products and, if they can’t, they need to have rich e-commerce content to help them imagine what that product would look and feel like,” Magliocca explained. “Williams-Sonoma has strong competition as well from Wayfair which has an outstanding content strategy throughout the customer journey and specifically on its product pages.” 

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