Seismic has enabled a customer experience revolution for OfficeMax New Zealand’s sales team, with the implementation of Seismic Enablement Cloud, an enterprise-grade technology, now an integral part of the company’s $1.5 million, industry-first, experiential retail spaces.
What is the post-pandemic work landscape?
After months of working at home, businesses have been forced to re-think their physical office space for their post-pandemic workforce. OfficeMax’s State of the Workplace study found that 62% who work in an office type environment feel that their job has a positive impact on their wellbeing, but their expectations of the physical workplace have changed.
Against this backdrop, OfficeMax introduced showroom experiences in 2020, with a unique offering that demonstrated the future of the workplace post-pandemic to business customers across technology, furniture, hygiene, café and other business categories.
Central to the showroom launch was Seismic Interactive Content to help transform the buyer experience, and for OfficeMax to capitalise on its investment by delivering comprehensive digital assets and resources for its sales and marketing team.
“We’re far more than just stationery, but some clients are unaware of the full suite we have to underpin work and learning – whether it’s packaging and safety supplies, or furniture and technology products,” said Evan Lawrey, Director, Marketing and Customer, OfficeMax.
“It can be intimidating for our sales teams to retain knowledge on everything we offer, and also didn’t have an easily navigable content repository. That was a key challenge for us.”
How vital has Seismic been to OfficeMax NZ’s strategy?
With the belief that confident sellers improve CX, OfficeMax leveraged Seismic to empower employees to deliver more relevant content and guidance to inform purchasing decisions.
Teams can now create personalised presentations within five minutes of a client’s request – and also run clients through an interactive microapp on a showroom touchscreen. “Seismic has improved our ability to engage with clients wherever they are located,” said Lawrey.
A survey of OfficeMax workers conducted pre-and post-Seismic uncovered a 31% increase in seller confidence when it comes to finding accurate content, with 86% able to locate and use content easily. Before Seismic, more than 44% of sellers were spending more than one day per week putting together content – such as customised product brochures – for customers.
After Seismic implementation, this decreased to just 4% of sellers. Seismic also allowed OfficeMax’s marketing team to cut down on time-consuming projects with the help of interactive content and content automation tech, underscored by analytics and insights.
“From a reporting perspective, we now have the data to aid the marketing team understand what we need to prioritise in terms of what we do and don’t do. It has eliminated the need for unnecessary collateral. This has evolved the relationship between our marketers and sales staff, who now work more collaboratively without facing bandwidth limitations,” said Lawrey.
Heather Cook, VP APAC, Seismic, said, “The adjustment to support workers and students in offices, classrooms and at home can be a challenging and costly feat for New Zealand’s businesses. Through its digital innovation, OfficeMax has not only transformed its showroom and ecommerce offerings, but empowered its workers to provide relevant, timely and tailored experiences to the clients that rely on the retailer’s products to keep them running.”
