Company: Sephora
Entry Submitted by: Candace Sims (candace_sephora) Community Manager
Community: Sephora BeautyTalk (sephora.com/beautyadvice)
Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience
Best Social Customer Experience Program
Sephora consistently strives to provide the best client experience, beauty expertise and services in the industry, whether it be in our stores, online, or via mobile device. We partnered with Lithium Technologies in September 2010 to launch our online beauty community BeautyTalk with a few high level goals in mind:
- To build the Sephora brand and community,
- To establish Sephora’s expertise in the beauty world,
- And to drive sales and loyalty
But our main objective was simple: to create a space where our clients could get their most pressing beauty questions answered.
BeautyTalk quickly became a thriving and vibrant community, a place where beauty enthusiasts around the world could meet and share stories. But a few months into our launch, we conducted a general client survey and received some interesting results.
We learned that 65% of our clients would prefer to get beauty advice from not only their peers, but from beauty experts as well. And if there is one thing Sephora has no shortage of, it's beauty experts! In August of 2011 we launched our Ask the Experts program with the help of our Sephora PRO artistry makeup team.
Sephora PROs are our handpicked elite team of makeup artists who travel the world to work as key makeup artists at events such as New York and Paris Fashion Week, and The Sundance Film Festival. Together with our highly trained beauty advisers in our call center, 6 PRO team members make up our roster of Beauty Experts, who are online between the hours of 6 am – 9 pm everyday answering beauty questions.
I
f a client asks a question in the Ask the Experts board, they are guaranteed a response from one of our beauty experts.
The Ask the Experts board immediately took off, and it is now in the Top 3 most viewed boards in the community.
We are very proud to offer our clients a point of differentiation from other beauty communities in that there is now a place where you can get beauty advice not just from your peers, but from trained experts with experience in the field.
We have also just recently launched a Live Chat program, where clients can get one on one real-time advice from experts in certain fields (past live chats participants have include skincare expert Ole Henriksen, Dr. Dennis Gross and tattoo artist and makeup guru Kat von D).
These live chats have given us a whole new way to engage with clients, and the response has been tremendous, with the chats garnering over 20,000 views each and hundreds of questions.
With our Ask the Experts program, we are bringing the knowledge of trained professionals right to the computer screens of our eager client base and providing a useful, fun and engaging social customer experience.
Feedback from our clients - What do you love about Sephora’s Ask the Experts program?
- “Everyone I know turns to me for beauty advice, but it’s nice to know there's somewhere I can go when I have a question too!” - fakeasnonfiction
- “I love being able to research online before buying and asking the experts questions about the products. They can tell us stuff or about products we would probably never know.” - makeupobesessed
- “They have really detailed answers that contain pretty much everything you need!” - rockstarg