Transforms customer experiences with interactive content

The Challenge

Sellers lacked the confidence needed to sell 

OfficeMax is a major retailer of office supplies and products to workplaces and schools and everything in between. They are at the forefront of creating interactive shopping experiences in the B2B space to showcase their product offerings in action. 

Director, Marketing & Customer at OfficeMax, Evan Lawrey explains the purpose behind their digital transformation. “Our key business strategy is to be known as a provider of workplace and education solutions – we’re much more than just stationery. Some of our customers are unaware of the full suite of categories we have on offer, from packaging and safety supplies to furniture, cleaning and technology products,” said Lawrey. 

OfficeMax sellers are expected to understand different categories and offerings, ranging from complicated safety equipment to technology products. “We sell thousands of products at OfficeMax, so there’s a lot of information to retain. As a seller, this can be intimidating and we didn’t have an easily navigable, single content repository to store all the information about OfficeMax’s products and solutions. That was a key challenge for us,” said Lawrey. 

The content repositories OfficeMax relied on lacked robust search functionality, making it challenging for sellers to not only find the content they needed but also find which repository it was stored in. Content was often outdated and off-brand.  

Additionally, the marketing team had no visibility into what content was being used by sellers and whether the content was working. 

The Solution  

Boosting seller confidence 

The rollout of Seismic at OfficeMax transformed their content repository capabilities. Seismic began to improve the sellers’ ability to find the right information to share with customers as well as to educate themselves on a range of product offerings. “Seismic is giving our sellers the tools to go out and confidently talk to customers from any industry about the vast range of product categories that we sell,” said Lawrey. 

For OfficeMax, the effects of a more confident seller trickled down to the experience of their customers. “Seismic has had a significant impact on our customer experience. Our sellers come across as far more knowledgeable and the customers receive more relevant content to help inform their purchasing decisions,” explained Lawrey. 

A survey of a group of OfficeMax sellers conducted pre-Seismic, and post-Seismic implementation uncovered a 31% increase in seller confidence in finding accurate content, with 86% of sellers finding content easily. Before Seismic, more than 44% of sellers were spending more than one day per week putting together content for customers. After Seismic, this has decreased to just 4% of sellers. 

The confidence in Seismic keeps the platform at the top of the toolkit with OfficeMax’s top-performing sellers. “We’ve seen a correlation between the top Seismic users and those who are getting the strongest results in terms of meeting their target,” said Lawrey. 

Engaging experiences for customers  

To showcase their various product offerings, OfficeMax recently unveiled an interactive B2B showroom experience. The showrooms are located in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, displaying a multitude of products and solutions while giving sellers more time in front of customers. “In New Zealand, we’re the first in our industry to launch this kind of B2B showroom. It enhances the customer experience because they’re able to trial the latest innovations in workplace products to find exactly what will work best for them,” said Lawrey. 

Seismic enhances this interactive showroom experience. Since OfficeMax can’t fit larger products in their showroom (such as industrial packaging machinery), they rely on Microapps to walk customers through more product offerings via touchscreens. “The feedback we’ve received from our customers on the showrooms has been phenomenal. They’re really impressed by the product demonstrations and the opportunity for hands-on experience,” explained Lawrey. 

OfficeMax puts the needs of its customers first through an engaging experience supported by equally engaging content. “The showroom allows us to have a really strategic conversation with our customers. The Microapp fills in all the gaps where we can’t put products on display and enables us to provide them with more information using videos and engaging content,” said Lawrey. 

While the experience of the customer has been the primary focus, the added benefit of Seismic with Tiled has been the ability to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. “It provides us with interesting content and collateral that our competitors don’t have, which gives us a leading edge,” said Lawrey. 

From print to LiveDoc: the product catalogue transformation 

Before the launch of interactive showrooms and digital content, one of the major content pieces marketing created included print catalogues. Not just a single print catalogue. The OfficeMax marketing team was responsible for producing nine different catalogues per year, one for each product category. 

These catalogues became an automation opportunity for OfficeMax. By integrating Seismic with their content management system that hosts product copy and images, they have been able to transition those physical catalogues into automated documents through LiveDocs. “Every product featured on our website is connected to Seismic and that allows our sellers to pull through whatever product(s) they want to feature into a LiveDoc,” said Lawrey. 

Previously, production was a four to nine-month process per catalogue. Multiply that by nine and the amount of overhead work by the marketing team was rather significant. “It was challenging for us to keep these catalogues up-to-date as some products would become obsolete as soon as you went to print. So now, in real-time, the sellers can consistently access accurate and up-to-date product content whenever they need it,” explained Lawrey. 

Now with the LiveDoc capability sellers can produce a catalogue in five minutes or less and the marketing team can save the hours upon hours of time previously being spent creating the print catalogues. “We’ve made a decision to stop producing these catalogues, which is a big step for us – it’s something we’ve produced for years. But with LiveDocs and Microapps, we’ve now got the right technology to help us sell our product categories more effectively,” said Lawrey. 

In addition to saving time, the LiveDocs technology gives sellers the ability to personalise the catalogues they are sending to customers and also gives them insight into how the customer is interacting with them through key data points. “This technology helps our sellers to be more customer-focused and really think about how they can tailor their recommendations to the needs of the customer for a more impactful result. This makes a significant difference and helps with conversion rates,” explained Lawrey. 
 

Scaling marketing bandwidth  

As OfficeMax’s marketing team continued to cut down on their time-consuming projects with the help of interactive content and content automation technology, they also honed in on Seismic’s insights. “From a reporting perspective, we finally have the information to help 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,” said Lawrey. 

This content prioritisation coupled with the technology to help them scale their work has helped transform the relationship between marketing and sellers at OfficeMax. Previously, marketing had to say no to most requests due to bandwidth limitations. “The introduction of this new technology has really helped both marketing and sellers work together more cohesively, enabling both teams to better understand one another’s needs,” said Lawrey. 

Another way the marketing team has been able to level up their relationships with sellers is through the Seismic Salesforce integration. “Our integration with Seismic and Salesforce has required the marketing team to learn more about Salesforce,” said Lawrey. “Now we can speak the same language as sellers because we understand the sales process.”