Hunkemöller Puts Customers First Everywhere They Search With Yext

As Europe's leading lingerie brand, Hunkemöller prides itself on providing fashionable bodywear to women across 21 countries and over 900 stores. The brand is focused on putting the customer first at every touchpoint, and it models its digital strategy around the modern woman. 'She' has high expectations of the brand and demands a seamless, omnichannel journey when shopping Hunkemöller's products.

To effectively serve its customers, as well as boost conversion from online to in-store, Hunkemöller needed a solution that would solve a range of digital challenges. Bert Middendorp, Manager of eCommerce said, "We wanted to be everywhere the customer needed us, at any time. The manual process we were using to deliver that discoverability was not a long-term solution and it certainly wasn't scalable." The brand wanted a solution that would underpin their ongoing mission for digital excellence. "Omnichannel is a diversifier for us in search, and we needed a partner that would support in our innovation."

Hunkemöller understands the importance of omnichannel excellence and keeping up with the latest trends in search. "We know that a lot of people are using third-party sites before they reach our website," Middendorf said. "To rank well, you have to have well-structured information, and it has to be the same everywhere. Consistency is key." Hunkemöller leveraged the Yext platform to seamlessly update business information across the digital ecosystem, and experienced a significant increase website clicks and direction clicks as a result.

The brand also uses Yext to manage and respond to its reviews. "We want our customers to know that we are listening to them, and by responding to our reviews we can show them that," Middendorf said. "Listening to our customers is ingrained in our organization. The data we pull from the Yext dashboard goes to our CEO every month so that we can continue to highlight our online reputation."

The third piece of the puzzle for Hunkemöller was the ability to bring a holistic view of customer interactions into a central dashboard. The brand uses Yext to gain both granular and broad insights into the performance of individual stores, regions, and markets. With 35 different users and four different user roles, Middendorf is able to arm regional managers with a holistic view of how their store is performing — all from one dashboard. Another valuable asset is the integration with Tableau, which is a "fundamentally important" feature of the Yext platform. "Everyone has full visibility of this piece of customer feedback and our store managers are really buying into it."

In the 17 months since launching in June 2018, Hunkemöller has driven over 1.2M clicks to its listings, experiencing a year-over-year growth rate of 56%. This included 43% year-over-year growth in direction clicks, 79% year-over-year growth in website clicks, and 66% year-over-year growth in phone call clicks.

Hunkemöller has also driven over 144M impressions to its listings — a year-over-year growth rate of 55%.

The partnership with Yext has allowed Hunkemöller to focus on continually innovating and maintaining their position as Europe's market-leading lingerie brand. By relieving the operational pressure of pulling together thousands of pieces of information into a spreadsheet, and uploading it to Google My Business, the team can prioritize productivity.

Looking forward, Hunkemöller will continue to leverage the Yext Search Experience Cloud to bolster their expansion plans for both physical stores and their omnichannel experience. "Continued geographical growth, and the accompanying digital touch points, is key to the future of our business," Middendorf said. "Using Yext, we will keep analyzing our competitive intelligence to inform our strategy, and exploring the new releases that Yext provides. The innovation is great. The constant stream of updates to the platform and integrations shows us that Yext will continue to grow as we do, and be the scalable partner we need."