If customers entered an inaccurate address due to misspelling, their former address validation provider would fail to recognize it. Hence, customers could not place their order, and many abandoned their baskets. This issue became even more evident when the work volume for customer support increased, having to complete the orders manually. This not only resulted in significant delays in the order processing but a substantial loss of revenue. It also caused a lot of pressure for the customer support team. Placing the order manually for those customers took a long time and subtracted valuable resources from the team helping other customers with overall product questions and professional product advice.
Sport Conrad hits the slopes with Loqate
Starting as a shoemaker’s shop in 1897, family-led Sport Conrad has been the number one address for everything outdoors: ranging from ski equipment and ski touring to outdoor sports in general. The outdoor retailer is now being run by the fourth generation and is still deeply connected to their roots.
Challenge
Solution
To gain a thorough understanding of the extent of the problem, the outdoor retailer introduced a ticketing system to their customer service as the initial step to get a better insight into the actual volume. After witnessing the issue, they opted to integrate Loqate’s address capture and verification solution to better streamline the checkout process for customers. This ensured the accuracy of all entered addresses and their deliverability.
Sucesses
- Faster and easier checkout
- Decreased monthly tickets from 30 to 0
- Recovered lost revenue
The Challenge
With Covid forcing Sport Conrad to close their physical stores for quite some time, the retailer experienced an uplift in traffic to their ecommerce store. They took measures by installing a different address validation software at the time to ensure accurate deliveries.
Implementing this software, they were unaware that there were still many incorrect addresses in their checkout. It was only brought to their attention by several customers that there was, indeed, a problem with the address validation: customers were prevented from placing their order if an incorrect address had been entered.
In an effort to solve this problem Sport Conrad introduced a ticket system within their customer support team. This revealed that their previous address validator would block customers from placing orders whenever an incorrect address was entered.
Sport Conrad found that they encountered an average of around 30 cases of cancellations from the system due to incorrect addresses per month. This caused an annual revenue loss of 90.000€. However, they acknowledged that the actual revenue loss might be higher, considering the possibility that some customers may have opted to switch to a competitor.
The solution
Recognizing the urgency of the situation, the outdoor retailer made a swift decision to change their address validation provider. Following thorough research and evaluations of various options, Sport Conrad selected Loqate as its new address verification partner.
Loqate’s pricing and service were both main driving points combined with the ease of implementation.
- Max Conrad, Director of ecommerce at Sport Conrad
By implementing Loqate’s address capture, customers can start typing any part of their address and the type-ahead tool will autocomplete the customer’s address. If a customer chooses not to search and type their address manually, Loqate’s address verify ensures the typed in address is correct and gives the customer another chance to confirm the corrected address.
The outcome
Through the integration of Loqate’s address validation tools, Sport Conrad has been able to reduce their support queries, improve customer experience and minimize customer support resources.
We had an average of around 30 cases of issues with address deliveries per month, and those are only the customers that contacted us. We now have 0.
- Max Conrad, Director of ecommerce at Sport Conrad
As a business with more growth on the horizon, Sport Conrad is gearing up for further enhancements – and Loqate will be there to support.
In short: Loqate helps our customer service teams to focus on priorities by taking the manual labour out of it and automatically preventing mistakes made by submitting forms. Any way that Loqate can help elevate more of that pain, while saving us more time for bigger issues, is a win win.
- Max Conrad, Director of ecommerce at Sport Conrad
