Supernova Award Category
The Problem
The customer landscape is always changing for any company. Total Gym Fitness began seeing that more and more of their customers were watching their infomercials while surfing the internet on their smartphone or tablet. The logical thing to do was to make Total Gym's customer engagement optimized for mobile devices, addressing the mobile user's unique shopping style and communication needs. Therefore, in mid-2013, TouchCommerce began Total Gym’s mobile transformation.
The Solution
With the success of TouchCommerce's live chat and automated customer engagement solutions on desktop, Total Gym wanted to implement similar features on mobile:
Mobile Live Chat -- mobile real estate is limited in space, so TouchCommerce implemented its unique mobile chat feature, which was customized for Total Gym in April 2014.
Mobile Guides -- due to the casual browsing mentality of smartphone visitors, the high traffic came with not-so-high conversions as compared to desktop and also tablets. 76% of Total Gym’s smartphone visitors were on the mobile site just doing research. Therefore, a different mode of interaction was considered for smartphone users via easy-to-touch options that guide the customer in the early stages of navigation to the product that matches their specifications -- automated mobile guides (TouchGuides from TouchCommerce) were the answer.
The results
Over the past year and a half, Total Gym has made mobile experimentation a priority, and, in collaboration with TouchCommerce, the team has made significant strides to optimize the brand's smartphone customer experience. Industry-wide, despite surging mobile traffic, smartphones convert at roughly one third of the rate of desktops/tablets, according to Practical eCommerce (http://bit.ly/1FhZnFM). This is often a result of the casual browsing mentality of mobile shoppers who prefer to research on their smartphones but then buy using a more convenient form factor with a larger screen, keyboard, etc. With Total Gym's openness to experimentation and testing new concepts and feature prototypes with TouchCommerce, the brand has not only been able to reap low hanging fruit to increase conversion opportunities overall, but has also innovated new creative ideas and strategies to address the challenge of smartphone conversion head on. With its latest focus on mobile, Total Gym now provides a top notch customer experience for shoppers across all its web properties -- desktop, tablet and smartphone channels -- and is focused on achieving its objectives to increase sales for the business while keeping the customer satisfaction at its highest. The brand's key metrics in measuring success of the customer online engagement program are: (1) customer conversion rates; (2) customer interaction rates. Specific figures detailed below in Metrics section.
Metrics
By creating a mobile engagement with special features that are tailored to mobile shopping behavior, Total Gym has experienced favorable results that lead to increased conversions:
*TouchCommerce-assisted smartphone visitors convert 697% better than non-TouchCommerce-assisted visitors
*Introduction of modern mobile elements (described in Technology section) in Total Gym's live chat design on smartphones resulted in 2.5 times more conversions than the original basic live chat design used for mobile devices
*Mobile guides (TouchGuides on the smartphone) resulted in 5x higher customer interaction rates in early website navigation when compared to live chat on the smartphone; furthermore, a 12% increase in overall smartphone conversion rate was observed after implementing TouchGuides on the smartphone
*Overall, 39% of Total Gym's overall online orders comes from TouchCommerce solutions across multiple channels, proving the benefit of helping the customer through the purchase process (70% from live chat and 30% from automated solutions, like TouchGuides)
The Technology
The TouchCommerce mobile chat solution showcases differentiating features such as a transparent background so users can see the site behind the chat window; a minimizable chat window to navigate throughout the site without losing the chat; and a message indicator that scrolls across the bottom with new agent messages / number of new chats. The automated TouchGuides display easy-to-touch options that guide the customer to the product that matches their specifications.
Disruptive Factor
As mentioned earlier, despite surging mobile traffic, conversion rates remain significantly lower on smartphones as compared to desktops and tablets -- this is true not just for Total Gym, but also for the industry as a whole. Much testing and optimization has gone into the mobile chat and mobile guides customizations for Total Gym, and the results speak to the effectiveness of the strategies being implemented. For example, the Total Gym - TouchCommerce customer engagement program overall shows that 70% of TouchCommerce-assisted orders are a result of live chat (as compared to 30% attributed to automated solutions). However, on the smartphone, automated solutions (TouchGuides specifically) have been shown to generate 5x more customer interaction than live chat. These findings demonstrate that smartphone shoppers have a higher propensity to engage an assistance solution high up in the purchasing funnel -- a key insight for the industry.
Shining Moment
The findings that Total Gym has uncovered with TouchCommerce can be helpful to other brands looking to try new smartphone engagement and conversion strategies. Total Gym and TouchCommerce are continuing experimentation with new methods and feature prototypes, including plans to test the efficacy of multiple choice tap responses for smartphone live chat and the possibility of pushing targeted offers to mobile users via email with a unique ID that ties together their interactions.