Helping Savoir Beds improve operational efficiency

Savoir Beds chose MintTwist to help design and build their first centralised quoting system

Embarking on a detailed planning process, MintTwist worked with Savoir Beds to audit the existing systems and processes and looked for new opportunities, improvements and efficiencies.

Savoir produce hand-made, bespoke beds in the UK, using the finest materials and craftsmanship.

With 14 showrooms around the world including in the UK, USA, Germany, France and China. “Standard” bed sizes vary between countries, and each country sells to both retail and trade customers. 

There are four bed types, numbered 1-4 with many configurable options, (examples are given later in this document) governing size, mattress characteristics, upholstery, case, stitching, type of frame, springs and many more.

This meant that the number of “variations” of beds on offer for sale are significant.  Producing accurate and timely quotations for clients, who may be a “walk-in”, is a challenge and the quality of a quotation provided by a showroom varies, with some documents being produced in Excel and others in Word, amongst others. 

 The lack of a central database means it can be difficult for head office to have visibility of a good sales pipeline and gain an understanding of new potential clients. 

A huge upgrade was needed

The showrooms were using antiquated systems and spreadsheets to produce quotes for clients.

Savoir were looking for a laravel development agency to embark on a new website design project with MintTwist to bring the site into line with their business plans, and to lift it above the competition.

Working in close collaboration with Savoir Beds internal operations team, our website developers went through an extensive planning and creative stage, addressing each of the business problems in turn and interpreting all the business logic needed to power the system.

The system was to become an increasingly important component in the sales lifecycle, so it was important that we pay close attention to the user experience to ensure that we balance the needs of the central team with the day to day need of the showroom staff.

Data and the CRM

We didn't want to reinvent the wheel, so we housed customer data in a robust CRM

We chose a CRM with a powerful suite of APIs to sit the quote system on top of. Our website developers then built an efficient and full-proof two way syncing system to work alongside dozens of API calls to pass data backwards and forwards from the CRM.

It was important the there would be a live feed of data from the website forms and brochure requests, so we created a flexible import system to effectively consume data from CSV/Excel/XML files as an additional source of data for the system, allowing staff to pick up live leads from the website as they were generated.

Testing and feedback

A key challenge for Savoir Beds was to get internal but in to the new platormf.

We worked closely with head office and a a select from showrooms to ensure that version one of the website quoting system was doing the fundamentals correctly.

Once we were all happy with the results, we widened the net to include a few international stores, Downtown New York and Berlin, to make sure that the internationalisation of the system was working as we needed it to.

Once the full group was involved, we took a big-picture approach to the full customer journey, which helped us to highlight many opportunities for small tweaks to the system which would allow us to hugely improve the experience for the Savoir Beds showroom staff and make it easier than ever to build quotes and follow up with customers.

The roll out

We launched the site across the global network of stores.

Not only are we very happy with the work we’ve done with Savoir Beds so far, but we continue to support the website and we’re excited to continue developing the internal website system so that it may work harder for Savoir Beds, now and in the future.