Hear from Nick Gordon, Digital Manager at Lenleys, as he discusses their recent transformation and the ways they’ve enhanced the customer experience in the furniture retail industry.
About Lenleys Home
Lenleys Home, established in 1936 by school friends Leonard Watts and Stanley Adsett, has evolved as a premium destination for customers seeking elegant furnishing solutions through their stores in Kent and their nationwide ecommerce website.
Led by Lavinia Watts, the third-generation family member at the helm. Lenleys is thriving, embracing innovation and change while staying committed to providing exceptional quality and service to its growing customer base.
Lenleys have used Swan Retail’s solutions for over 10 years, upgrading to SRS (Swan Retail System) in 2020 and more recently driving growth with SwanPay, Omnisend and Swan’s ecommerce platform powered by Sellerdeck (part of the ClearCourse Group).
Lenleys and Swan Retail’s partnership
We had the opportunity to chat with Nick Gordon, the Digital Manager at Lenleys, on the significant impact Swan’s software has had on the company’s recent transformation. With over a decade of experience at Lenleys, Nick has been instrumental in driving the adoption and implementation of innovative solutions within the organisation.
The challenge for Lenleys
“We had a website, but it was incredibly basic, not transactional, and lacked real-time stock links. We knew we needed to evolve, we wanted a better web presence and a fully transactional website, but to get there, first we needed to change our back-office systems.”
Lenleys previously used multiple systems for stock, orders, accounts, etc. “we needed to consolidate into one main system to drive all aspects of the business to achieve our goal of being a modern business delivering great customer experience”.
What made you choose Swan Retail?
“We evaluated multiple solutions from different software providers, but the main reason we chose SRS was that it did everything we needed in one program. We were already with Swan, so we had a great foundation to start on.”
“The new system is intuitive, integrated and makes sense in terms of how it works for furniture retailing.”
“With Swan coming together with ClearCourse, it pushed our innovation forward. We moved from our previous finance provider to SwanPay because of all the benefits of the integrations within systems.”
These synergies between the back office and embedded payments bring efficiency benefits for tasks, like easy reconciliation, and give Lenleys’ customers more convenient ways to pay.
How was your experience moving to the new system?
“It is never easy to make large-scale transformations and get everyone on board. Now we have the transformational software in place, the team is embracing the new ways of working and seeing a huge improvement in customer experience day-to-day.”
“It’s a labour of love to get it all up and running but it has been a huge opportunity to build the more efficient ways of working we wanted from the very beginning.”
Lenleys did a major part of the implementation during a period of Covid lockdown and received support through digital channels. Many of the Swan team involved have first-hand experience in furniture retailing so were able to guide Lenleys through implementation drawing on their experience.
“We received the support we needed from the Swan team, allowing us to launch when we planned to – this was fantastic.”
“Collaborating with a provider who understood the system and had actually used it in a furniture retail setting was key.”
“Our project manager understood why we needed things to work in a specific way, this experience was crucial in successful implementation.”
What has new retail technology meant for Lenleys customers?
“We have expanded our audience with a younger demographic because of all the changes we have made through our website. We want to have a consistent experience for customers from our social channels and website, through to our stores for all demographics – our solutions now enable this.”
“Web traffic and in-store footfall has increased. The ability to see our customers’ journey starting online and then into the store has been important in understanding customer experience and how we progress.”
“The introduction of Live Chat on the website recently has been great, we have had a lot more customers use this than we anticipated, all adding to a great customer experience for a wider demographic.”
What have the changes meant for you, Nick?
“They have made life more streamlined; we can use the new systems to speed up previously manual processes and improve accuracy. The integrations have helped massively, driving automation, and removing many old processes.”
“Personally, it has enabled me to spend more time focusing on other aspects of marketing for Lenleys, which was not possible previously. I can now spend time delving deeper into our marketing metrics and evolve our activity as a result, driving revenue and growth.”
How do you feel about the future of the partnership?
“We feel positive – we have more ideas on how we want to continue changing and evolving with consumer demands. There are always new features and continuous developments from Swan and ClearCourse which enable us to meet those challenges and continue to move forward in modern retailing.”
We look forward to helping Lenleys continue to grow, transform their customer experience, and drive their ecommerce and in-store sales.
Find out more about Swan’s furniture retail software used by Lenleys: SRS (Swan Retail System), SwanPay, Omnisend and Sellerdeck’s ecommerce.
