Buy a new sleeping bag from your mobile phone, submit and track a repair for your tent or get some tips on camping with kids. These are just a few of the features transforming the customer experience on BigAgnes.com (opens in new tab).
The manufacturer of camping gear and apparel has traded in its home-grown ecommerce platform for SuiteCommerce Advanced. However, Big Agnes thinks of the new site as more than just a place to sell its products.
“We wanted a website to showcase our brand and connect with fellow camping and outdoor enthusiasts,” said Chris Tamucci, Director of Operations at Big Agnes. “Having a unified platform with SuiteCommerce Advanced allows us to do that.”
The new website is the next evolution for this fast-growing company. Big Agnes was already running key aspects of the businesses, including inventory and order management, CRM, and ERP on NetSuite. It also utilizes the Bronto Marketing Platform (opens in new tab) to engage with new and existing customers through emails. By including SuiteCommerce Advanced with the NetSuite solution, the company can spend more time innovating the customer experience and less time chasing data in different siloed systems.
“In this omnichannel world, it’s detrimental to the mission to be running on separate systems,” said Tamucci.
Content and Commerce
This was the first opportunity for Big Agnes to share its brand story online and the company wanted it to be visually inspiring. Enlisting Modified Instance to design the site, photos Big Agnes has been collecting over the years are used to show their passion for the mountains.
The Sleep in the Dirt blog, which is seamlessly incorporated to the website, features everything from company news to product reviews and inspiring stories from employees and other adventure seekers.
Big Agnes also knew its product pages had to be detailed and informative for its sedulous shoppers who research products extensively before making a purchase. SuiteCommerce Advanced allows the company to showcase technical specs and features, photos and instructional videos on their product pages and throughout the site. The site management tools make it easy enough for marketers to update the pages, instead of having to use the web developers.
With captivating imagery and rich content, user engagement on the site has grown. Pages per session have increased by 18 percent and average session duration is up 2.5 percent. Meanwhile the bounce rate has dropped by three percent.
Being able to offer its customers a rich mobile experience has been a huge improvement for Big Agnes. Now with an optimized mobile site, mobile and tablet conversion rates have increased 35 percent and overall conversion rates are up by 27 percent.
Improved Customer Support
An important part of Big Agnes’ business is supporting its products after purchase. During peak camping season, the company will receive thousands of cases. Big Agnes has replaced a slow, paper-based customer support process with a NetSuite online form to generate a case. This information along with all other customer information is captured in NetSuite, providing a 360-degree view of all customer activity. Customers can go into their online account and track the status of the case.
Moving on from Manual Processes
Big Agnes has doubled productivity in order and inventory management since implementing NetSuite. Before, employees would have to manually enter orders that came in from the web. Now, the orders automatically flow into the NetSuite ERP, so customers get their gear much faster.
Creating new product content each season used to also require a lot of manual work updating both back-end and front-end systems. Now the site draws information from a single item record in NetSuite and as Tamucci says, “is saving us a tremendous amount of time.”
Supporting Retail Partners
Big Agnes is supporting its retail partners including REI and hundreds of independent outdoor shops by including a store locator on the website. This functionality is delivered through Locally software solution. Customers can select a retailer, browse current stock, view store hours and get directions.
“Our website is helping customers make the decision to buy Big Agnes whether it’s in a retail store or our website,” said Tamucci.