Barbeques Galore has undergone a wide-reaching transformation, including building out its omnichannel capability to enhance in-store and online customer experience.
The specialist retailer of barbeques and backyard lifestyle items has 90 stores around Australia.
CEO Angus McDonald told Digital Nation about its five-year transformation journey, spanning a new enterprise resource planning (ERP), ecommerce platform and marketing stack.
The latter two systems “supported us to launch our loyalty program, the BBQ Legends Club,” he said.
Work was also completed around “changing our B2B interfaces with an updated solution, and around our order management system.”
“There’s been quite a broad number of activities to improve our ability to deliver consistent experience to our customers.”
The transformation came out of a broader review of the organisation’s strategic plan completed back in late 2019.
This “set some expectations for how we wanted to deliver a much more engaging omnichannel experience for our customers” through “different digital touchpoints,” McDonald said.
“What it ultimately allows us to do today is deliver that seamless integration of those different touchpoints of our brand into an experience where people can seamlessly move between different parts of that experience.”
McDonald said the company is using technology to “help break down the barriers between the different areas and different functions of our organisation in our quest to deliver that truly omnichannel experience.”
Some results seen so far have been very encouraging, according to McDonald.
“The obvious area that we follow very closely is the customer experience and that’s a very important focus for us, of course.
“We use net promoter score as the most important measure of that and we’ve seen a real improvement in the consistency of experience, particularly for our online shoppers.
“We have always had a relatively high net promoter score for those who shop in-store, but there’s always been a job to bridge that gap for those that are having items delivered to home or maybe shopping online.”
He added there still some work around improving the “clarity of information and communication” with improved efforts on inventory availability and delivery messaging already “begin closing that gap.”
“We’re very encouraged by the progress so far. More broadly, over the course of that time, we’ve gone from a business with a fairly immature ecommerce presence to something that is now very much in step with what you would expect of a high involvement, high engagement category like ours.
“That’s been a journey of some pretty tremendous growth throughout that period that’s been supported by this integration of these different parts of the brands.”
Reducing friction
McDonald explained the retailer’s efforts have partly been around removing customer friction.
“In terms of customer responses, we follow the feedback that we’re getting from our customers as well as notice the clear growth in revenue that we’re generating through some of these different areas, but even the anecdotal feedback that we get from our team in-stores is [important] as well.
“Most people who walk through the doors of one of our stores have probably spent some time online before that journey doing research on the website – reading product reviews, getting information, checking pricing and availability.
“Often they’re coming into the store for that final confirmation step,” he said.
McDonald added that “getting all the plumbing right underneath that has allowed us to get a much more consistent message across each of those touchpoints”.
“All of this work that we’ve been doing over the past few years has been very much about ironing out those areas of friction and getting that consistent experience no matter which touchpoint you engage with our brand.”
Next steps for the company entail optimising operations as the country heads into the warmer months.
“We’re still very focused on that continued improvement of our experience for customers when we’re delivering product to them and that’s something which we’ve done quite a lot of work on in the last couple of years, but we know there’s still more to be done.”
Artificial intelligence use cases
Beyond this McDonald said the company will be “looking more broadly at other areas of business” and “how we can use AI in an increasing way” to support its goals.
McDonald said some generative AI use cases have been identified around information requests.
“There’s obviously a number of areas in our business where we already use machine learning.
“That’s very much present in some of the [product] recommendations [to website users] and some of the different things we have, both online and in some of our marketing platforms and the way that they deploy across different environments.
“Then inside the organisation we’re using different tools around forecasting replenishment. There’s certainly an expectation that we’ll continue to do that.
“The area that’s become very interesting in the last year around generative AI is particularly around knowledge management, which I think is a really interesting area.”
If there is a technical product sometimes it can be “quite a complicated process to find the right solution to suit a customer’s home.”
“Or there may often be cases where people have very specific technical questions they may want to ask about their barbeque, and we have loads of information within the organisation that we’ve accumulated over our 45 or so years of existence.”
He said using emerging tools may lead to staff finding product information more easily to better serve customers.
New ways of working
McDonald said the company is also working on store refurbishment as part of its work “to develop our brand”.
He said its transformation work allows the team at Barbeques Galore to operate in ways it couldn’t do just five years before.
“We sell this complicated product with a long tail of inventory, and this is where we are finding ways to make that product accessible in every location across our store network,” McDonald said.
“That’s where it allows us to deliver a much better experience to the customer and present them with a wider range of options.
“It’s not just good for the way we’re operating our business, but it ultimately delivers a much richer customer experience”.