Transforms Furniture Sales with AR (Boosting Engagement by 16%)
School Specialty is a leading provider of educational products and services in the United States, catering to the needs of students and educators from early childhood through high school.
With a wide offering that encompasses furniture, curriculum solutions, and supplies, School Specialty is dedicated to enhancing the learning experience in schools nationwide.
Before implementing Epicor CPQ, the School Specialty furniture buying process was complex and time-consuming for customers and their internal teams. Customers had to trawl through paper catalogs and limited online resources to find the right products for their needs.
There was no easy way to visualize the result, which is pivotal for a company offering thousands of different types of furniture for varying uses, rooms, and school color schemes.
Another significant challenge for School Specialty was the need for a streamlined, consistent sales process across different channels and teams. The sales team, customer service representatives, and eCommerce platform operated independently, resulting in disparities and inefficiencies in the furniture ordering experience.
This disjointed approach made it challenging for School Specialty to provide a seamless, personalized buying experience and hindered its ability to manage and continue to grow its furniture business efficiently.
Managing product data was another key challenge. Each product variant, hundreds of thousands, required a separate SKU, resulting in overwhelming codes and difficulty managing product data at scale.
The absence of a centralized, streamlined product data model led to inconsistencies and challenges in maintaining accurate product information. As a result, the School Specialty eCommerce site suffered from a cluttered and confusing online experience, strained page load times, and impeded performance.
School Specialty implemented Epicor CPQ across its sales, customer service, and eCommerce teams to transform its furniture buying experience.
By leveraging the powerful features of Epicor CPQ, including 3D visualization, augmented reality (AR), and integrations, School Specialty unified previously disconnected processes into a single, user-friendly workflow for the users of multiple systems.
Epicor CPQ empowered customers to configure and visualize furniture options in real time, exploring different colors, sizes, and styles to find the perfect fit. Sales teams could generate accurate quotes faster, and product data was managed efficiently across all channels.
One of the standout features of Epicor CPQ is its real-time 3D visualization capabilities, transforming how School Specialty customers configure and customize their furniture.
Customers can now view photo-realistic 3D representations of their selected products, complete with their chosen colors, sizes, and finishes. Through the Epicor CPQ responsive visual interface, they can easily experiment with different configurations, ensuring they order precisely what they need with complete confidence.
School Specialty took its furniture-buying experience to the next level by leveraging Epicor CPQ augmented reality (AR) technology. This lets customers visualize furniture in their classroom settings before ordering. It's an immersive and engaging buying experience that enhances decision-making and sets School Specialty apart as the digital leader in their space.
Epicor CPQ seamlessly integrates with existing systems at School Specialty, including our internal quoting system and CRM. This integration has been crucial to streamlining their sales process; as Amy Schultz, Associate Director of Digital Commerce, noted: “Many alternative solutions have a connector to CRM systems, but having a connector to our internal quoting system as well, that was the magic."
By connecting Epicor CPQ with its ERP, eCommerce platform, CRM, and quoting system, School Specialty created a cohesive, end-to-end solution that streamlined its entire sales process. No more switching between software––School Specialty now has a single configurator process enabling faster, more accurate quoting and ordering.
The Epicor CPQ AR configurator significantly enhanced the School Specialty sales process. Sales representatives can now use AR to demonstrate their furniture in real-world settings, making their pitches more compelling and engaging.
By superimposing virtual 3D models of furniture into the customer's actual space using a smartphone or tablet, the AR configurator allows customers to see exactly how the products would look and fit in their environment. This immersive and interactive functionality helps customers better visualize the products, understand the scale and dimensions, and make more informed purchasing decisions, ultimately leading to increased sales.
Since implementing AR, School Specialty has seen a 16% higher engagement with the configurator, with customers exploring over 375,000 product options.
The Epicor CPQ streamlined the product data management process, and visual product configurators enhanced School Specialty website performance, contributing to a 22% increase in custom configurations added to the cart.
Before Epicor CPQ, our customers had to rely on a single image on our website or in our catalogs. They couldn't see any other color configurations or truly understand the size differences. For example, a 12-inch chair is drastically different in height compared to a 24-inch chair, but that wasn't clear from one image alone.
By reducing the number of SKUs to manage and index, the website became faster and more efficient, resulting in an improved customer experience. Moreover, with site speed being a critical factor in Google's search rankings, the School Specialty web improvements positioned them for better SEO performance.
Epicor CPQ helped provide School Specialty with valuable pre-sale data it had never accessed before. By tracking the customer journey from initial Engagement with the visual product configurator to the final purchase, School Specialty gained unprecedented insights into customer behavior.
The prior configurator and tools across systems offered a disjointed experience compared to the unified configurator in Epicor CPQ implemented across multiple systems… The prior process created a significant mismatch between what the customer saw and what the sales representative saw, contributing to confusion and inconsistency.
Analyzing trends, popular configurations, and customer preferences captured by Epicor CPQ enabled School Specialty to optimize its product mix, tailor marketing efforts, and deliver a more targeted, personalized customer journey.
The teams at School Specialty and Epicor CPQ have developed a close collaborative relationship, prioritizing continuous innovation that is aligned with customer needs. School Specialty submits feedback and ideas to the Epicor CPQ product team, which incorporates that feedback into the product roadmap to align with School Specialty goals.
Although Epicor CPQ is part of the more extensive Epicor suite of products, it exists as a standalone solution. This enables Epicor CPQ to help provide one-to-one support and continuous innovation tailored to evolving School Specialty priorities and business requirements.