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TFG Boosts Online Conversion Rate by 35.2% With Bloomreach Clarity

TFG boosts revenue per visit and online conversion rate with Bloomreach Clarity

Story Behind the Brand

TFG (The Foschini Group) is the largest fashion, lifestyle, and specialty retail group in South Africa, with a growing presence in the UK and Australia. The group has a portfolio of 37 brands across over 4,800 outlets on 5 continents. With brands like Foschini, Markham, Sportscene, @home, and Jet, TFG’s vision is to create the most remarkable omnichannel experiences for their customers. To support this vision, TFG has launched Bash, a lifestyle ecommerce offering, where the Group’s sought-after retail brands and loyal customers come together seamlessly in one virtual platform.

39.8
%
higher revenue per visit for customers who interacted with Bloomreach Clarity during Black Friday
28.1
%
lower exit rate for customers who interacted with Bloomreach Clarity during Black Friday
35.2
%
higher online conversion rate for customers who interacted with Bloomreach Clarity during Black Friday

Challenge

TFG has always had a customer-first approach, which is why it wanted to find new ways to create personalized experiences for its customers without being intrusive. The company was aware of recent advancements in AI technology that would open up new ways to connect with customers. In particular, the organization wanted to explore using conversational commerce as a solution.  

However, since conversational AI is still a new technology, TFG had concerns: What would it be perceived as assisting with? Would the solution just provide stock answers (that any algorithm could spit out)? Would it hallucinate and provide inaccurate results? Would it be a closed system? 

TFG needed a solution that could properly address these concerns while also driving consequential business impact.

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Solution

To explore how conversational AI would affect the customer journey, TFG implemented Bloomreach Clarity on Bash, TFG’s ecommerce platform. Bloomreach Clarity is our conversational shopping solution that can unlock a new revenue channel for businesses. It connects with customers at key moments and creates personalized experiences by offering tailored recommendations and helpful product information. 

The Bloomreach team helped Bash implement the model and integrate the sources of data (which included Bash’s extensive product catalog and a range of FAQ pages) without the need for engineering resources — the team at Bash just needed to specify the criteria they wanted to test. 

“I was impressed with how easy it was to implement,” said Clynton McCalgan, the Head of Digital at Bash. “Also, anything we can implement without engineering is a massive plus.” 

In particular, what stood out to McCalgan was the speed at which Clarity learned. In very early testing, Clarity struggled with providing deeper answers and parsing more abstract questions. This was due to the solution being early access at the time, but the Bloomreach team worked closely with them to improve the product, and in a very short amount of time, Clarity overcame all those hurdles. 

“What surprised us was how quickly Clarity developed and grew,” added McCalgan. “It didn’t quite understand abstract questions at first, but then something clicked and it started dealing with them substantially better. It developed rapidly within a handful of months — I can only imagine what it’ll be able to accomplish a year from now.” 

From there, Bash set up an A/B test where Clarity would be shown to customers who engaged with at least three product pages on its website to test its real-world effectiveness. 

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Across the board, Clarity exceeded expectations. It’s a brand-new frontier and everyone was unsure about what would happen, but Clarity learned quickly, performed better than expected, was easy to use, and was a standout success.

Clynton-McCalgan_headshot

Clynton McCalgan

Head of Digital, Bash

Results

After running an A/B test throughout Black Friday weekend, Bash found the results incredibly promising. 

As part of the test, Clarity would proactively reach out to customers who had engaged with three product pages and answer questions. After discerning customers’ preferences, Clarity would then connect them to the right products. These customers who engaged with Clarity during Black Friday saw a statistically significant higher online conversion rate of 35.2%. Additionally, Bash saw a 39.8% higher revenue per visit (RPV) and a 28.1% lower exit rate

Now, TFG hopes to take these great results and expand them on Bash by adding Clarity to product listing pages (PLPs). More specifically, the company plans to add Clarity under the “Add to Cart” button in the form of pre-generated questions that a user can click on to resolve any concerns that are holding them back from completing the purchase. 

And if that goes well too? Well, the opportunities for Clarity to drive consequential impact are limitless. 

“We were amazed at how large the conversion rate difference was with Clarity,” stated McCalgan. “We’re excited to move Clarity further up the funnel and get them in front of users earlier in their journey and at scale. If we can replicate the numbers we’ve seen, it’ll simply be phenomenal.”

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