Profile
Brown Thomas and Arnotts is a group of seven luxury department stores located in Dublin, Cork, Galway and Limerick that is using Qudini’s Queue Management Software and Appointment Scheduling Software to create powerful and engaging in-store experiences. Brown Thomas and Arnotts are part of the Selfridges Group, which provides leading luxury shopping experiences for millions of customers around the world. Bringing together the international store portfolio of Canadian entrepreneur and philanthropist Galen Weston, Selfridges Group consists of five iconic brands; Brown Thomas and Arnotts in Ireland, Holt Renfrew in Canada, Selfridges in the UK and de Bijenkorf in the Netherlands.
Sector
Retail
No. of stores
7
No. of employees
6000
13%
increase in appointments
78%
of customers with appointments make a purchase
50%
of appointments booked online through organic traffic
What our clients say
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If you are looking for solutions to help improve your customer experience and increase sales, then this is the best company to get in touch with. Qudini is very flexible with their clients in providing them with the best possible solutions to uplift their current business set-up to new heights. Highly recommended!
Head office team | Brown Thomas
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We rolled out Qudini to all of our beauty brands and we have seen a massive uptake on it. Without even much marketing over the last few months we’ve seen up to 50% of some of our bigger beauty counters have their appointments made online, and people are just picking that up organically. We’ve been working with Qudini over the last year and we’ve rolled out about 412 services over 90 counters, 40 brands and 7 stores and we’ve exposed all of that online, so our rate of acceleration has just been stratospheric.”
Sarah Esler | Digital Innovation & Omni Channel Lead | Brown Thomas
The challenge
The beauty counters within the Brown Thomas and Arnotts beauty halls offer a range of beauty services, such as make-up application and make-up lessons. These services, offered by Charlotte Tilbury, MAC, NARS, Bobbi Brown, Dior, Chanel and beyond, invite customers to dress-up, experience the beauty brands’ make-up and skincare products and build long-lasting relationships with both the beauty brands and the department store brand in the process.
Previously, Brown Thomas’ beauty had a basic appointment calendar that was used by the store beauty advisors to manually book appointments for customers that they spoke to in the store. They had no way of allowing their online customers to pre-book appointments, no method to seamlessly communicate with customers about their booked appointment and no integration with their CRM loyalty tool. This meant that providing services to customers was manual and time consuming, and the store teams were not serving customers as often as they could have been.
The Solution
Brown Thomas and Arnotts deployed the Qudini Appointment Scheduling Software to improve its appointment booking experience and drive footfall to their in-store beauty services from online. After analysing the appointment scheduling software market, they chose to work with Qudini due to the scalability of our out-of-box solution and the company’s flexibility and drive to collaborate with them over the ideal solution for their needs. The Qudini Retail Choreography software enables Brown Thomas and Arnotts and its beauty brands to not only increase footfall and improve productivity but also offer a more premium and tailored service that drives greater sales and customer loyalty.
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CUSTOMER JOURNEY
The Brown Thomas appointment customer journey with Qudini’s online booking system:
- Customers using the Brown Thomas or Arnotts websites can select a brand and book a beauty appointment
- A confirmation SMS and email confirms the customer’s booking
- A reminder SMS and email are sent the day before the appointment
- When the customer arrives in-store, the store beauty advisors check them in and see them right away
- Integration with the Brown Thomas CRM software displays the customers’ profile, enabling the colleague to provide a personalised service to the customer
- The beauty concessions teams can seamlessly add the customer to the Brown Thomas loyalty scheme.
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SHOP FLOOR CHOREOGRAPHY
Using the Qudini Shop Floor Management features, the in-store beauty concession teams are now able to manage their appointment customers, alongside their store associates and shop floor activities on their tablet devices.
Results
Hover over the tile to read quotes from our customers
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More footfall driven to store
Several brands have seen up to 50% of their appointments being booked online, driven by organic traffic. The forecast is even higher once the online booking service is promoted on the website and elsewhere. Qudini enables customers browsing the Brown Thomas or Arnotts websites to seamlessly book appointments in any of their stores. As a result, more customers are learning about their beauty services and visiting their stores for appointments.
We’ve definitely seen an increase in customers purchasing products. Because the level of customer services are much improved, we are able to serve those patients in a better timescale, which makes not only the patients come back to us, but recommend us to friends and family.
– Jacob Burns, Store Assistant Manager, Specsavers Plymouth
Increased sales
78% of customers with appointments make a purchase. Appointment bookings increase store footfall and enable staff to be more prepared for customer appointments by accessing customers loyalty profiles, all leading to greater sales and conversions for the Brown Thomas and Arnotts business. Increased productivity also allows staff to focus on customers and up-selling rather than taking calls to book in/amend appointments.
I am certain that Qudini helps improve customer loyalty. It helps us to identify why someone has come into our practice and allows us to offer them the best possible journey at the right place at the right time.
– Josie Forte, Director, Specsavers Plymouth -
A richer CRM database and more loyalty scheme sign-ups
Qudini integrates with the Brown Thomas CRM software and automatically updates profiles and adds any customer without a profile. This enables Brown Thomas to develop a richer and more up-to-date CRM database and sign more customers up to their loyalty scheme without taking any additional time to do so.
Qudini has enabled us to have much more pleasant customer experience in the store and we can definitely see that we’ve had a percentage growth in terms of revenue. People are able to come in and complete their sight-tests a bit quicker, which means that they are more likely to stay with us and buy glasses.
– Josie Forte, Director, Specsavers Plymouth
Improved productivity
Previously, the beauty brand colleagues within Brown Thomas stores could only be reactive to the walk-ins coming in to the store. With Qudini Appointment Scheduling, more of their time is filled with appointments. The Qudini platform also saves the beauty brand teams time by making it seamless to create and manage customer appointments and CRM loyalty profiles. This enables them to focus on customer service.
Qudini helps me in knowing with confidence where my patients are and that leaves me having less stress within my working day and that has made me perform better.
– Val Collard, Lead Optometrist, Specsavers Plymouth -
Greater attendance rate
The percentage of customers attending their appointments is 13% greater than when Brown Thomas used a more manual system to book and manage appointments in-store.
As a management team it’s a fantastic tool and we’re now able to see how long certain processes take within the store. That’s allowed us to coordinate how many members of the team we have for various different parts of the journey. That, in turn, has improved their customer service levels, reduced waiting times and added to the general ambience of being organised.
– Josie Forte, Director, Specsavers Plymouth
More competitive offering
The Qudini booking system enables Brown Thomas and Arnotts to capture more footfall from online and turn it into in-store traffic as compared to their local competitors without an online appointment booking option. Up to 30% of appointments are now booked outside of store opening hours.
The main benefits of Qudini are that it vastly improves customer service in the store and improves staff morale. We’ve improved sales and it just improves the overall store performance. Happier customers equal happier staff and vice-versa. So we’ve certainly seen the benefits of that.
– Jacob Burns, Assistant Store Manager, Specsavers Plymouth -
Better resource allocation
The Qudini data analytics platform enables Brown Thomas and Arnotts’ beauty brands to analyse their concession’s footfall trends in order to more effectively allocate resources.
Improved loyalty
The improved customer experience coupled with the simplicity and ease of booking a service has led to more customers returning to the store for additional beauty services.
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Greater insights
Qudini capture a wealth of data that enables each Brown Thomas and Arnotts beauty concession brands’ head offices to better understand their customer needs and behaviours to improve their resource planning and marketing initiatives.
Improved concession brand relationships
By offering this valuable service, Brown Thomas and Arnotts has improved its relationships with its beauty concession brands.