A global beauty leader gets a B2B sales makeover.
Regis Corporation used Magento Commerce to create a cut-above solution for franchisee management.
100%
adoption by franchises
Products:
Objectives
Help franchisees supply their salons and manage invoice payments in one location.
Create efficiencies and reduce errors.
Increase revenue.
Results
100% adoption by franchises
11.4% increase in web order revenue
12% reduction in inbound calls
“We chose Magento because we needed a platform that would meet the immediate and growing needs of the business, help franchisees do more retail business and improve functionality and navigation.”
Jeff Johnson
Digital Business Manager, Regis Franchise Product Sales
A B2B overhaul for a beauty salon giant
Regis Corporation is a global leader in beauty salons, hair restoration centres and cosmetology education. With over 90 years in the beauty business, Regis Corporation currently operates over 9,000 hair salons and related hair care businesses. These corporate and franchised locations operate under such famous brands as Supercuts, Vidal Sassoon, Regis Salons, MasterCuts, Cost Cutters and many more. These and other salon concepts are located in the U.S. and in 11 other countries across Europe and Asia.
Their B2B sales website, the Regis Franchise Product Sales store, was running on a 10-year-old platform that had come to the end of its life: adding new capabilities had become too resource-intensive. Errors were a daily problem. And — critically for a hair-styling company — the user experience and site design were unfashionably out of date. Even simple things like finding products, placing orders and self-service had become so difficult that customers had started to abandon online ordering and were picking up the telephone.
Jeff Johnson, the brand’s digital business manager, said, “Our goal in re-platforming our B2B business to Magento was to ensure our franchise users have a tool to supply their salons and manage their invoice payments in one location. We also wanted to solve pain points from the previous platform and create efficiencies while increasing revenue.” Regis Corporation was looking for a platform with a defined roadmap of capabilities that would support forward-looking customer experiences, easier content management and future digital commerce integrations. Basically, they needed to shift ordering from the telephone back to the Internet. Enter Magento Commerce.
“A project of this size requires skilled people on both sides of the fence. Fortunately, we have both in place and have seen success as a result.”
Jeff Johnson
Digital Business Manager, Regis Franchise Product Sales
A powerful B2B sales solution
“The first key to achieving the end goal is to understand who the users are, their behaviours and their needs and goals. The second key is to have an all-in, 100 per cent dedicated team that includes internal resources and integrating partners,” said Johnson. They chose Perficient Digital to make their commerce vision a reality and the project started on 1 May, 2017.
The Perficient Digital team integrated dozens of quality off-the-shelf third-party extensions from Magento Commerce. These extensions helped them to customise the franchise portal experience, handle payment of credit card orders and assignment of sales tax and empower customers to quickly and efficiently order staple products. They also implemented an extension that provides sales and customer service support to their franchisee customers.
Meanwhile, User Management and Privileges allows salons owners to assign roles and permissions to staff. Salon owners can easily switch between their franchise locations to manage store activity and assign specific roles and permissions to staff. Each salon is assigned a specific product catalogue and allowable substitutions based on their brand, region and any local restrictions. And, orders can include over 100 line items in the basket to support the typical franchise order volume.
Magento Commerce seamlessly connected to Regis Corporation’s iSeries ERP (JD Edwards, JDA), receiving up-to-the-minute data about customers, products, categories, pricing, inventory and invoicing — while sending JDA back the web orders. iSeries then sends Magento Commerce additional updates following the completion of order processing and invoicing. Franchisees can pay any product invoice, franchise fee or marketing fees within Magento Commerce, using ACH or credit cards. They can even redeem rebates and backbar rewards or pay for invoices using their points balances.
A self-serve success story
The site launched on 8 January, 2018, after an eight-month implementation. It was an immediate success. The new user experience allows Regis franchisees to place orders, view their order history, set-up preferences and pay invoices, all from multiple roles. Customers can find and filter products using a more dynamic search, view inventory availability and take advantage of promotions in addition to the brand’s existing loyalty programme.
Thanks to Magento Commerce, franchise salon owners can now create and assign salon privileges and permissions. Meanwhile, a Salon Selector varies the account/catalogue view based on the logged in customers’ assignments. And the Payment by Rebates and Redeem Backbar integration facilitates faster and easier payment and access to free promotional products.
Since the new site launched, their February and March figures show a period-on-period increase in web order revenue of 11.4 per cent, with a strong increase of 13.3 per cent in their most prominent franchise brands. Errors are a thing of the past — Regis has also experienced a significant reduction in error handling due to the platform’s integration with their distribution centre inventory, resulting in almost real-time inventory display. And finally, inbound calls have dropped 12 per cent compared to the same time last year, as 100 per cent of franchisees have moved back to online ordering.