The Customer Experience

Then there's buying furniture. Is there any big-ticket consumer item that is less fun to buy? The $178 billion furniture industry is infamous for its disregard of customers and for its slow-as-molasses cycle times. "This has been a manufacturing-driven industry rather than a customer-driven industry," says Andrew Brooks, 36, a McKinsey alum who recently left a position as chief operating officer of Channel One Network. "It's strange, really. You almost never buy furniture for an 'unhappy' reason. You buy furniture because you have a new child, or you've bought a house, or you've landed a new job. And yet customers almost never have anything but horror stories about the experience."

"Putting the customer at the center isn't something that this industry usually does," adds Carl Prindle, 31, executive producer at Furniture.com. "There are so many frustrations: the length of time that you have to wait, the fact that you may have to go to five or six stores to find the style you want."

Brooks and Prindle mean to change all that -- by reinventing the customer experience as furniture retailing moves from the physical world to the Web. Today, Brooks is leading a tour through an empty showroom in downtown Worcester, Massachusetts. On January 31, the business that had been housed in this facility vanished as a brick-and-mortar operation. Empire Furniture Showroom, a family-owned company that had occupied the same building since 1947, finished up its clearance sale. In its place, another company emerged: Furniture.com. Along with Empire's old inventory -- dressers, sofas, beds -- went all of the old rules that had governed the furniture business.

Like online merchants in many industries, Furniture.com can offer greater variety than its storefront counterparts. It features more than 50,000 items, compared with the roughly 30,000 items that you'll find at the biggest of the "big box" retailers. But breadth of selection isn't the primary driver of a great furniture-buying experience. Personalization is what counts. A twentysomething looking for the perfect nightstand doesn't much care if a store carries 150 different sofas. A middle-aged couple whose home is decorated with country styles won't spend time evaluating the latest dining-room tables from Scandinavia.

Customers "don't want a football field of furniture," says Brooks, who is now CEO of Furniture.com. "They want a boutique filled exclusively with the stuff they love."

That's why Furniture.com is deploying a range of technologies that can zero in on a shopper's tastes and then offer products that fit those tastes. The most important of these technologies is a throwback: human interaction. Furniture.com employs 20 "design consultants" -- many of them certified interior designers -- who offer advice by phone, email, and live chat. These consultants are not traditional salespeople. Customers can't see them, and they don't get paid by commission (although they are eligible for a bonus that is tied to team sales goals). But like traditional salespeople, they identify potential buyers and then offer to help.

Diane McGowan, 49, is a case in point. She's a design consultant who has been trained to use Furniture.com's live-chat software. She monitors the site, sending out "feelers" to ask users if she can be of assistance. Here's a typical exchange:

"Yes, thanks. I'm looking for a rectangular dining-room table with chairs -- possibly Windsor chairs -- and maybe a hutch."

"Can you tell me what type of wood, and what style, you are looking for?" McGowan types.

"Hmmm. I know I don't like oak very much. I know I like cherry and maybe maple. I prefer dark- to medium-colored woods. But harvest tables are sometimes made of pine, aren't they? I wonder if they can be stained to a more medium color."

"Yes, they can be," McGowan types. "And every manufacturer uses its own stains. On the site, we usually have a thumbnail for a color, which you can click on to get a better idea of how it looks."

Design consultants can send out swatches of fabric, along with handwritten notecards. They can also look at what a customer has placed in the site's shopping cart (with the customer's permission, of course). That way, they can suggest compatible pieces. "Selling furniture online is more challenging than selling books," says Rose Mauriello, 42, vice president of sales and customer care. "But it's easier for us to provide a great experience than it is for a traditional retailer."

How did Furniture.com learn so much about selling furniture online? By analyzing the frustrations associated with buying furniture in physical settings. Brooks and his colleagues spent long hours watching customers shop. One of their conclusions was that consumers were hungry for more information about products. "People don't really know the difference between a $499 sofa and $699 sofa," says Peter Halunen, 32, vice president of merchandising. "People would look at a price tag. Then they'd turn over cushions, looking for the fire-retardant tags that say how a product was made. But that's all manufacturer-oriented information; it doesn't help at all."