How Hairco is taking the customer experience to the next level with TCOG

At Hairco, the ambitious chain of specialty hairdressers, IT serves a superior customer experience, both offline and online. Lowering thresholds and increasing service, that’s the mission.

In 2017 Hairco opened their first store with supplies for professional hairdressers in Deinze. The company wants to be more than a wholesaler: Hairco’s ambition is to revalue the hairdressing profession and therefore also focuses on service, advice and training. Meanwhile, the wholesale company has 12 physical stores in Belgium, 7 of which are franchises. These stores are in easily accessible locations with parking, especially along major access roads.

Online turnover doubled 

Hairco uses a clear bricks + clicks model: hairdressers can not only visit the physical stores, but can also place their orders in the webshop, on the phone or with the sales ambassadors. A true omnichannel story, says Data & Applications Manager Serge De Mey: “The sector long stuck to sales by representatives, but that model is outdated and will probably disappear. For us, the webshop is an important part of the service to our customers. Online sales have doubled since the corona crisis, and that evolution is now increasing.”

Seamless shopping experience

Hairco serves very different customer profiles: there are hairdressers with ten employees, hairdressers who work alone, hairdressers who do not have a salon but come to their home … Not all of them find the time to come by, although the role of the physical store remains important: “A hairdressing product you should also smell, feel and see. Hairdressers come here to learn about novelties, or appreciate the human contact. We have customers who have never visited a store, others come once a month and in between order online.”
 

For all these customers, Hairco wants to offer the best service, and IT plays a crucial role in this: in Serge De Mey’s vision, IT has to take the customer experience to the next level, both in the webshop and in the physical stores. Essential for a seamless shopping experience across channels is the linking of all systems: “The cash register system, the webshop, our PIM system in which we store all product information and photos … The goal is to have all those systems communicate perfectly with each other.”

Accelerating processes

Hairco has been working closely with TCOG as a software supplier and partner since the start. “When I started at Hairco, I had barely three weeks to open the first store … Exciting, but it worked out and it was a nice start. The relationship with TCOG was always very good. I am in direct contact with the programmer, with no intermediary, which only improves the speed of execution and communication.”
 

Big plans are on the table. The webshop must become the place where customers can find everything: invoices, orders, stock … and that regardless of the channel used. “We want to speed up processes and ensure that the customer always sees the right information at the right time. An example? We give customers vouchers when it’s their birthday, they’ve followed a training course or they’ve just become a customer. That voucher automatically pops up at the check-out. But we want to be sure that a voucher used in the afternoon at the checkout in the store is not used again in the evening in the webshop.”

High service, low barrier

Hairco is innovating their processes with a new tool that allows them to easily add a product to the order list by scanning the barcode with their smartphone’s camera. “This is still not very common in a business-to-business context. A nice realization.” Serge De Mey is already thinking one step further: “We can link the payment service Klarna to this, which makes it possible to pay only 21 days after the order.”
 

Hairco and TCOG are also planning links with delivery service PostNL. Customers will then be able to see their track&trace link on the webshop itself. In time, hairdressers will be able to place a webshop order at Hairco with a simple press of a button, with an automatic link to stock management: “When our system receives the message that PostNL has delivered order x to hair salon y, the cash register system automatically adjusts the stock. The hairdresser doesn’t have to do anything.” That’s the direction Hairco wants to go further: a high service level and low barriers, to make it as easy as possible for hairdressers. “We are b2b, but hairdressers also behave like consumers, they also order from bol.com and other webshops.”