E-commerce case study: Agent Provocateur

Agent Provocateur plans to use social technologies to gain a better insight into its customers’ desires

Agent Provocateur, the luxury lingerie retailer, is preparing for a site relaunch in September that will address usability issues, strengthen online brand identity and intensify its customer focus.

“The site redesign is customer-led to improve the online experience and create better customer journeys,” says Catherine Hall, an e-commerce specialist from Tela Consulting who has been brought in as e-commerce project leader for the company.

The redesigned site will be optimised for search engines, which should increase its visibility for potential customers. But Hall believes usability and search engine optimisation go hand in hand.

“If you do usability well, you automatically enhance search engine optimisation,” she says.

The update should make the web site easier to navigate and more intuitive for users through improved content and structure with more key words on the page.

“The business is focusing on e-commerce as a major part of its strategy going forward, with sponsorship from the highest level as the company’s chairman is involved in the e-commerce steering group,” says Hall.

In the past, the site has been overtaken by seasonal campaigns at the expense of brand identity, which is something Hall plans to tackle.

“It felt like a redesign and a new web site with each campaign, which we want to avoid in the future. Customers have a great experience in the shop and are immersed in the world of Agent Provocateur. We need to be sure the online environment reflects that,” she says.

The site already uses technologies such as Twitter and has a Facebook presence, but there are plans to develop social technologies further.

“We’re looking to further enhance our social media strategy, building on the uses of social networking sites, with a view to starting our own blog. We aim to engage in every way with visitors,” says Hall.

Gaining a better insight into customer preferences through more extensive use of social tools should help to boost Agent Provocateur’s online sales. “We want to learn as much as we can about customers and how and why they buy online by putting them right at the centre of what we are doing, delighting them and giving them what they want,” says Hall.

As the company gets to know its online customers better, it wants to merge this knowledge with offline buying patterns.

“We want to get a single view of the customer. At the moment we have a retail customer database and an online customer database and we need to tie them up by having one master database. There is an ongoing project to define what the master database should be,” she says.

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