Footwear retailer Skechers was looking for a way to offer a high-quality customer experience through its various channels by answering customer questions with a social tool on its website.
The goal: Giving customers the most relevant and timely product information to drive immediate purchase decisions. Skechers needed an easy-to-implement solution that would provide the most relevant and timely information for customers.
While product descriptions on skechers.com provided value for customers, the descriptions often fell short in answering specific questions. Skechers needed a tool that would rapidly answer customers’ specific questions while also serve as an FAQ device for visitors.
It also needed to improve organic search rankings by making the content readable in search engines, and drive down high bounce rates as visitors left skechers.com to look for the same product on other sites. This meant providing product information to make the pages stickier and increase the likelihood of conversion.
Skechers chose PowerReviews based on its success with its Customer Reviews, which displays nearly 121,000 reviews on sketchers.com. The solution was chosen in part because of its Social Answers functionality, which provides an integrated Q&A platform that powers fast answers from credible sources.
Shoppers can now submit product questions through an easy-to-read form on product pages. Intelligent routing queues immediately push questions to the most qualified source based on flexible business rules. In less than three hours, customers receive the answer in a follow-up email with a link directly to the product page to complete their transaction.
PowerReviews’s Social Answers table is also on Skechers’s product pages, and the keyword-rich copy can be indexed to improve SEO.
Skechers plans to integrate Customer Reviews and Social Answers with PowerReviews’ Social Loyalty. Soon members of the Sketchers Elite Rewards program will earn points toward discounts or free shoes by submitting reviews or answering product questions.
Using PowerReviews, Skechers saw a 32% conversion increase for products with Q&A, an 80% open rate on answer notification emails and a 51% conversion rate on answer notification emails. Also, bounce rates and customer support volume decreased significantly.
Skechers’ real-time chat feature was removed from the website after the company recognized that customers were turning to Social Answers as an alternative, resulting in lower costs and a better overall user experience.
“With Social Answers we were able to boost our rankings in Google’s natural search for the keyword “shoes” to be on the first page of results,” said Timothy Lakin, ecommerce merchandising manager at Skechers.