Remodelling the home improvements industry

The pandemic signaled a change in the way we see our homes. No longer just the sanctuaries to which we retreat for safety and relaxation, the places in which we bring up our families, the spaces in which we entertain, our homes became our workplaces, too. Due to this transformation, it’s not surprising the home improvements market recorded double-digit growth through 2020.

Four years on, the trend continues to defy the broader market. It is a spending surge that has attracted new players to the industry and forced traditional businesses to rethink their offering and their approach to customer service. Home improvement may be the very essence of bricks-and-mortar, but today’s industry is more digital, more mobile, and more online.

Digital experiences across all aspects of the business

St Maclou, a leading expert in flooring and installation for over 60 years, is reinventing itself to offer a modern, frictionless customer experience. Present throughout the country with its 139 stores, the brand is fundamentally transforming its organization to support its customers' renovation projects.

The goal? Streamline St Maclou's logistics and customer processes by providing simplified access to information, shorter construction times, and a clear overview of project progress.

In practice, finding the balance between stock, installer availability, and coordination with different partners is a challenge that combines agility with complexity. In this complex journey, St Maclou saw an opportunity—to make the whole process more connected and more transparent. 

“Our business has always been a three-party relationship: the customer, the seller, and the installer,” says Guillaume Porquier, Director of Information Systems at St Maclou. “Digitization can improve our productivity in the broad sense.”

Taking a platform approach to transformation

At the heart of the transformed St Maclou is ServiceNow. “We immediately recognized the importance of a platform approach, providing one data model and one architecture,” says Guillaume Porquier. “Our first priority was to connect our nationwide network of installers, but we always understood that there would be more use cases.”

With multiple digitization projects taking place, the platform, he continues, provided the best route to creating a company-wide ecosystem: “The ease with which we could integrate new features could really accelerate our transformation. Using ServiceNow Integration Hub, we configured a link between our data pool and ServiceNow Customer Service Management within just two hours. This would not have been so straightforward with multiple ‘pure play’ solutions.”

With support from ServiceNow partner, Devoteam, St Maclou is piloting ServiceNow Field Service Management (FSM) at eight of its stores in southern France. The Posy app (a combination of the words ‘pose’ and ‘easy’) creates an entirely new approach to coordinating the work of installers, while removing paper-based procedures. Installers are now grouped by region rather than individual stores, their location and availability updated in real-time and viewable by sales and operations teams online. Previously, sales teams would have to call each store to check installers’ availability which, in turn, impacted the homemaker’s experience.

“First of all, the mobile solution completely matched our needs,” Guillaume Porquier says. “The fact that it’s an open solution means its potentially suitable for other applications and creates scope for other services beyond installation.”

Making all information available to remote teams

Every step of the sales process is now digitized on ServiceNow, from customer details to site photos to the technical specifications. All information is available instantly to installers wherever they are working, via ServiceNow Now Mobile.

Guillaume Porquier says early signs are encouraging. St Maclou’s in-house and partner installers travel an average of nine million kilometers a year; better coordination of installers, and installers having all job details to hand, is expected to cut this by one million kilometers. This allows the company to significantly reduce its carbon footprint and continue to work towards its CSR commitments.

All installer activity is now tracked in the ‘Posy’ application with information updated automatically. ServiceNow notifies homemakers of any amendments to contracts in real time, and information can also be relayed from installers to sales staff in the event of any problems. 

Auto-generating a job checklist

Alongside Posy, St Maclou has developed an application to record all the technical requirements for a particular job. This automatically generates an electronic checklist showing which products and accessories are needed and what tasks need to be carried out, clarifying the work of installers and driving consistency.

If any preliminary on-site work is needed, such as removing furniture or releveling a floor, the app generates a quote for any additional services that St Maclou can offer. Once the customer has signed the contract, all this information is automatically entered into the system, which then suggests three possible time slots.

Simplifying the operational burden

Of course, digitization is driving new levels of productivity and, in turn, improving processes for employees, but it’s also—more significantly—making home improvements easier and hassle-free for St Maclou’s customers.

“The main benefit is that it makes our work so much simpler,” says Fabrice Duffeau, Director of Services at St Maclou. “Automatically generating an electronic checklist has enabled the company to boost productivity by 10%.” When an installation is completed, the customer signs off the job on the installer’s smartphone. This alerts St Maclou’s invoicing system which automatically bills the customer. The whole process is clear and transparent for the customer and helps avoid any surprises when it comes to budgeting. 

“Our invoicing process is also 10% quicker,” adds Guillaume Porquier. “Our next plan is to model the time involved in each job to streamline the scheduling process.”

Strengthening profitability and loyalty

Guillaume Porquier admits there was initial hesitancy from some installers about the new approach. There were concerns the real-time tracking would be too intrusive, or a sense that independence was being undermined. Happily, the reality has been different. Installers report fewer wasted trips and recognize that they are better prepared as a result.

It is also good for business. Optimized planning means the company now assigns 85% of projects to its in-house installers and 15% to partner installers. Before Posy, this ratio was 65:35. This is a more profitable arrangement for St Maclou and creates greater visibility around work quality.

Thanks to optimized schedule management, St Maclou’s in-house installers gain in efficiency and visibility in the short and medium term, enabling more balanced collaboration with partner installers. In addition, installers can check that everything is in order 15 days before starting a job by referring to the relevant electronic documentation, saving both time and money. Customers can also use the mobile app to get in touch with St Maclou at any time, such as to reschedule a job in the event of an emergency.

Enabling scale, remaining intimate

St Maclou is in a hurry to get moving. The plan is to roll out Posy nationwide by the end of 2024. The IT management team has already retrieved large volumes of data during the pilot phase and the idea is for national data to be pooled together, region by region.

The intention is that Posy, powered by ServiceNow, will become a critical part of every operational decision made at St Maclou. It will act as the critical element in the three-party engagement between homemaker, seller, and installer. In the words of Guillaume Porquier: “ServiceNow means we can industrialize our processes while remaining intimate.”