Yoox Net A Porter : Bringing Conversational Commerce to our Customers

Gabriele Tazzari, Director of Research & Development, YOOX NET-A-PORTER GROUP

Over 1 billion people use WhatsApp every day to stay connected with their family and friends, and over time, more people are using the app to communicate with businesses they care about too.

In its most recent blog post, WhatsApp described how it has realised that these interactions between businesses and customers were happening in a very basic way.

Working with businesses like airlines, e-commerce sites, and banks, WhatsApp has identified areas to improve upon and, in the coming months, the messaging service will be testing new features that aim to solve some of these challenges alongside partners such as YOOX NET-A-PORTER GROUP.

Test features include notifications such as delivery confirmations, verified business profiles and more.

How we are testing with WhatsApp at YOOX NET-A-PORTER GROUP

Our NET-A-PORTER personal shopping team has been using WhatsApp to give our highest value customers - Extremely Important People or EIPs as we call them - an even more personal service.

This happened entirely naturally. Over a year ago our Personal Shopping team realised that their EIPs were constantly on WhatsApp and preferred to receive product suggestions and complete transactions via the app, rather than to check their emails or log in to the service.

To date we have made countless sales across WhatsApp, even selling a single item for over £80,000.

Our Personal Shoppers have also been experimenting with existing functions on the app such as status updates. Rather than sending customers individual documents and pictures of items, the team now uploads the items as status updates - allowing them to give their customers a real-time, selfserve shopping experience and comment directly on the items shown.

Our Use Cases of the Future

Realising that consumers increasingly prefer to receive information via personal messaging services rather than email, we have been working with WhatsApp to improve the way we use the WhatsApp service with great results so far.

To evaluate the customers' feedback during this experiment, we directly integrated our new Order Management System (OMS) with WhatsApp by using its new Enterprise solution, allowing us to use the messaging service as a notification system for order and shipping confirmations.

Market testing is taking place on YOOX in Belgium. Customers who place orders via our stores can receive order and shipping confirmations on WhatsApp.

Customers even responded to us with great feedback such as: "Really forward thinking" or "I love receiving information from you this way". Finally, less than 3% of the users asked to unsubscribe from notifications via WhatsApp.

In the future, we hope to engage customers with our business via the app, giving every single user an immediate and personal service, whether it is an automated notification or real-time customer care or personal shopping services.