Anton Sport
How a small retailer succeeded with service design
A few years ago Anton Sport was hit with the hard reality of competition from e-commerce players and low-cost retailers, and the sporting goods market became increasingly polarized. Serious sports enthusiasts were looking for specialists and professional products, while leisure shoppers wanted needs-based products at low prices.
They had to make some tough decisions and cut back on most of their initiatives and heavily reduce their costs. Fortunately they realized how vital the digitalization of the shopping experience would become, and that they had to up their game to survive in this extremely competitive marketplace.
Anton Sport needed to provide a seamless shopping experience between the digital and physical space by reworking all touch points along the customer journey.
Anton Sport is a medium-size retailer in the premium end of the sporting goods market, well known in the Oslo region of Norway. Their expert knowledge spans from alpine and cross country skiing to running equipment and bicycles. Most importantly they are recognized for their high level of personal service which is one of their most powerful assets to keep ahead of the competition from the large national retailers.
In 2014 Anton Sport partnered up with Unfold to develop the strategy and conceptualize planned initiatives. We designed and developed the new customer experience as well as the supporting back office UX used by Anton Sport employees. The strategic choices and the commitment to a long term plan is really starting to pay off, big time.
All customers are rewarded — every time!
Anton Sport offered a discount system for businesses and local sport clubs, but they had never registered and communicated directly with regular customers. The first step of the master plan was to make sure there was a meaningful purpose for all customers to register.
The backbone of Anton Club is a bonus reward system. As a registered customer you get a fixed bonus kickback on all purchases. The more you shop, the higher the bonus, starting from 10% at your very first purchase and all the way up to 30%. So, a 1000 NOK purchase on 20% immediately gives the customer 200 NOK bonus to spend on later purchases.
Signups are done by simply registering a phone number, and then a bank account. All credit card usage linked to this account will then award bonus. To spend bonus, customers can easily generate barcodes to be scanned at the register or just use it as a means of payment in the online store.
Getting customers signed up
Anton Club was placed in front of everything as the new improved shopping experience. Every visitor is a potential member and the benefits must be understood and appreciated within seconds.
This required the staff to be trained and familiar with the program. They were given tools and routines which were carefully integrated in the sales process, and of course implemented in the checkout process online.
Signup is not onboarding
Getting customers to sign up is quite easy when you can offer a bonus on items they are about to purchase. Nothing to lose, everything to gain. But the real onboarding starts after sign up. At this point we need to understand their needs to serve them better, keep them inspired and add real value. Educating the members and turning them into experts is vital to make them rule out the competitors next time they need something.
In reality the real onboarding is just getting started once your customers have signed up to the service.
In addition to the bonus system, Anton Club offers a wide range of benefits including one-click access to activity courses, archived receipts and exclusive access to special deals every day.
Building the branding strategy
Taking the the customer experience to a whole new level required Anton Club to be built as a complementary brand. We wanted to separate the communication related to Anton Club from Anton Sport at large. A certain exclusiveness was needed in the visual language and this was achieved by imposing a new typographic scheme, a bold colour palette and an easily recognizable logomark to trigger attention.
The program is based on administration of bonuses and a central piece of the visual identity is the bonus progress wheel. We use this actively in the branding and marketing of the service to give potential customers a visual cue to help them understand what Anton Club is all about.
A custom approach to digital commerce
From the very beginning we knew we wanted a unique digital user experience with no platform limitations. This is why we decided to build a full scale shopping experience with back office administration from scratch.
Thats a bold task to take on but we decided to separate the UX from backend systems in order to have the best possible setup for an iterative and long-term process, constantly focusing on end-user benefits. In our opinion we would not have the same opportunities with an off-the-shelf e-commerce solution.
This is why we decided to build a full scale shopping experience with integrated back office administration from scratch.
Products and brand stories are the main focus of the online store. The Anton Sport brand is fairly subtle whereas Anton Club is quite prominent and hard to miss. At any given time there’s a decent selection of promoted member deals with direct and easy signup functionality. During checkout immediate savings are presented before you are completing the transaction.
Once signed up the shopping experience is taken to a new level. It enables us to offer one-click purchases directly from customer dialogue, primarily on mobile devices.
To fulfill the role as experts in various sports, the webshop provides all sorts of “how to guides”– advice on what equipment to choose, product maintenance and so forth. Guides and promoting banners are fun and easy for staff members to create as their tools are optimized for their daily workflow.
Technically speaking , it feels like a turbo engine — why?
Flexibility is key in the evolving business of online retailing. So instead of relying on an off-the-shelf solution, we started by designing and building an API. This layer sits on top of more than a dozen different systems including logistics, order processing, and payment processing etc.. An API driven platform allows us to quickly integrate with new systems and services with minimal impact on client applications.
Alongside the API we developed two React client applications, the customer facing antonsport.no and a custom backoffice application.
Bye bye old catalogue — Go Features!
A glossy catalogue printed twice a year became extremely time consuming and a considerable cost, even when manufacturers where charged for display space and coverage.
The old catalogue was made redundant so we needed to come up with better ways to present the manufacturers and their products in various contexts.
In the process of digitalizing the customer experience we threw out the glossy catalogue from the stores…
We introduced a concept called Anton Sport Features. The idea is to let manufacturers brand a full story or feature alongside products they want to promote. This is presented in the framework akin to a stand-alone campaign site with the Anton Sport brand being secondary. Technically speaking it is built on top of the e-commerce platform and products can be bought directly from within the manufacturer branded environment.
This became popular with the manufacturers and distributors who often lack their own digital setup for the Norwegian market. They can easily set up a promotion site at Anton Sport and link external traffic directly to where products can be bought.
Campaigns and supporting banners can be created effortlessly from the back office system and Anton Sport also uses this space to promote their own sales material.
The result is a powerful way to retain income from an old model in a way that is way more efficient, fun and useful for Anton Sport and their manufacturers.
Artificial Intelligence for efficiency
Constant improvement of product information and labeling is a major task. With tens of thousands of products that change frequently, this is also tedious and repetitive. To ease the workload, improve content and take searchability to a new level, we have developed an AI model that is perfect for categorization and rich product labeling. The model is based on visual machine learning that captures information in product pictures.
The training of the AI model has made it capable of tasks such as differentiating between a rear suspension mountain bike from one without. It is also able to understand if skis are cross country or alpine and even if they should be best used in slopes or off-piste. It is able to understand colours and other characteristics that soon will enable visitors to search for patterns, textures, and other descriptive terms. A search for “long white t-shirt with blue stripes” is something that would be virtually impossible to label manually with this product volume.
The AI model understands if skis are cross country or alpine and even if they should be best used in slopes or off-piste
By running the AI model on a batch of new products the basis information and categorization is done by default and the staff can concentrate on adding personal experiences and useful supporting material.
Commitment pays off
Now we have an incredibly flexible solution and an excellent foundation for building engaging and useful services for customers. Bonus is an efficient hook for sure, but this is something anyone can offer.
The smartness is in how high-level sports knowledge is applied to customers, how we reduce shopping friction, how we understand what our customers need and how well we serve them. We have an inspiring roadmap with existing features like in-store interactive installations and automatic stocktaking that we are able to build from the digital foundation that is already in place.
Even though we are just getting started we have achieved some great results. The digital ecosystem in combination with a carefully designed customer journey has proven to be a profitable investment. By now more than a tenth of the population in the Norwegian capital has signed up, which is extraordinary for a small retailer with only 15 stores in total.
The webshop revenue has skyrocketed, and close to 50% of all turnover in stores and online are made by registered users. They also spend 27% more every time they shop — which they do at a higher frequency than non-registered users.
1/10th.……. of the population in the capital of Norway are signed up
240%……… increased revenue from e-commerce
46%……….. of total turnover is by registered users
27%………. higher average purchase value (cart) by Anton Club members
From external marketing to personal dialogue
The digital platform and the new capabilities have drastically changed the way the organization manage their workflow. The staff tools are pleasant to use and allows for faster adjustments to market changes and adoption to customer needs. Instead of spending big on mass communication, the focus is now based on communicating directly with their customers, which is highly effective when done right.
Because the staff have tools available to perform many of their previously time consuming tasks, they can focus more of their time on providing excellent service and information for their customers.
The new tools have drastically changed the way we work, think and act — and most importantly, it has made us more profitable and our daily tasks a lot more fun. Having the customers attention by a click of a button is also a powerful opportunity that has to be managed carefully. We need to know when to hold back and when to speak, and when we speak it must be highly relevant
– Jon Harald Rønning, CMO
About Unfold
With a strong entrepreneurial mindset we partner with businesses and new ventures to help them become relevant, efficient and more profitable. Through strategic planning, design thinking and suited technology we create immersive brand experiences and digital products with a clear purpose — to make every day better for its audience.
If you want to get to know us better visit unfold.no, or take a look at our Behance page for more case studies!
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