Nowadays, 92% of employees participate in the community, and 10% of single users of the website now visit the community. The community section is the second most visited section of the website, only behind ‘products’ with more visitors than sections such as ‘offers’ or ‘stores’ among others.
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Company: Leroy Merlin
Entry submitted by: Paco Campos
Community: Leroy Merlin Community
Lithy category: Digital CX All-Star
Leroy Merlin is Europe’s leading DIY store, with a brand spirit of 'sharing.' After 25 years in Spain, topping the sales lists and with an average of 3 million customers going into one of its 60 stores each month, it was proposed that the spirit of sharing should be taken further. Leroy Merlin decided to create a community that would transform the relationship with its customers. A great digital customer experience.
The Community: a digital evolution for and with the customer
Created in November 2014, with the objective of being the largest Spanish-speaking community related to home improvement and DIY, we faced a significant challenge: to generate high-quality content capable of inspiring, educating and empowering users to live better. A lot of content and of the best quality.
In order to achieve this, we had to involve the whole company, 9000 “collaborators,” since as leading experts, the knowledge was on the shop floor, in the sales assistants.
We challenged the “collaborators” all over Spain on a voluntary basis, to send in their articles and projects in order to select the best of them. As such, they became the authors responsible for the Community content strategy. We started off with 80 specialists who we called “animators” with 837 items of content. This has now grown to 281 animators who have co-created, with the help of more than 7,500 creative customers, 67,000 items of content.
Nowadays, 92% of employees participate in the community, and 10% of single users of the website now visit the community. The community section is the second most visited section of the website, only behind ‘products’ with more visitors than sections such as ‘offers’ or ‘stores’ among others. But the community is not only online, every week more than 300 members of the community participate in events and workshops at stores, creating an off-line relationship. In total, more than 7,265,116 visits endorse the growth of the project.
How did we achieve it?
The Community is an environment in which the stores have so much importance that it could not remain in its digital form alone. Up until now, the central figure around which the customer-Leroy relationship revolved was the sales assistants.
As such, it was important that the animators had working hours devoted to the task, direct contact with the users: customized profiles with authorship https://comunidad.leroymerlin.es/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3691, the option to follow a specific expert, the option to send private messages to an expert, to mention them in a forum, etc.
Furthermore, we wanted to make the most of the store and web spaces to involve all of the partners and stakeholders of Leroy: fitters, influencers, bloggers, who could generate workshops and content, in order to empower users through learning by doing, and try out new products for the first time.
The three pillars of our Digital CX efforts - both online and offline:
1. Inspire: Through highly visual multi-author blogs in which the best projects and users of the Community have their space to shine. As well as being inspired, sharing their ideas and knowledge, users can make purchases in the online store, gathering together all of the necessary materials for the project shared in the Community.
2. Educate: By means of Bricopedia with over 5000 pieces and the free weekly workshops in stores. Such is the success of the 8000+ workshops carried out to date, that this is currently one of the main reasons why users access the Community. Signing up for the workshop requires just one click.
3. Empower: Forums in which the animators and other users reply in less than 24 hours so as not to slow down the creative momentum of projects. Likewise, in order to meet all of the user’s needs, the Community offers dual browsing, by areas of the home and by theme.
The strength of Lithium
Our Digital CX efforts depend on a wide range of Lithium products, which generate synergies between themselves, including: Blog, Forums, TKB, Ideas, Premium Gamification, Lithium SMM, Lithium Microsoft Dynamics Integration and Lithium Omniture Integration.
Growing by the day
The Community received almost 3 million Single Users in 2016, of which 50,000 have registered. Together with the 281 animators, they have generated over 67,000 items of educational content, achieving legitimacy as a DIY reference. They make up the animators team which day after day, with their passion, knowledge, dedication and commitment ensure that we continue to improve.
7362 responses have been generated in forums and 91.7% of collaborators have registered.
The workshops have become a focal point for customers interested in all of the training that Leroy Merlin offers, reaching two significant milestones:
As such, every Saturday, Leroy Merlin takes some of people’s time, their most valuable asset. We share our knowledge with everyone who wants to improve their home and the users who attend the workshops give this learning back to us in the form of projects, answers for other users in the forums and comments.
The Community, with content at its core, has become the catalyst for the social transformation of the company. The different areas of Leroy Merlin consider the Community to be an important ally for the development of their business: SERVICES, HR, BRAND, PURCHASING DESK, IT CLUB.
The Community now forms part of the everyday work of every animator, collaborator, store and department of Leroy Merlin, thereby enabling the company to create a much closer, more continuous relationship with its customers, and helping to improve the buying experience.
Because “Bringing your ideas to life,” does not have to mean doing it alone.
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