John Lewis gets customers to book "shopping services"

Personal shoppers and beauty treatment

The booking system currently has 12 different services on offer, like a ‘personal shopper’, ‘FingerPrint Jewellery Service’, ‘home design’, ‘personal styling’ and beauty treatments. The store employees in the different departments will take care of the schedules themselves.

The first results are positive: the system attracted a bigger crowd than anticipated and is already 30 to 50 % ahead of schedule, both when it comes down to interest and actual bookings. “We immediately saw significant volumes of enquiries come in, validating our theory that this would be popular with our customers and enhance their omnichannel experience,” said Richard Ambler, head of product services at John Lewis.

The system not only makes life easier for the customer, it also provides John Lewis with a huge array of interesting customer data. The chain, which has 43 department stores, gets about a third of its turnover online and hopes this booking system will help tie offline and online together at another level.