Success Stories: Tessiland

Tessiland, is a leading e-commerce in Italy in the weaving sector, founded in 2015, but with a much more solid history behind it; in fact, Giovanni Mustone, founder, explains during our interview that he was ´born among the yarns´ in Carpi, the home of knitwear, where his family, now in its third generation of knitters, has been working in this sector since 1968.

Tessiland is a purist e-commerce as Giovanni defines it-selling only online has the advantage of bringing immediate revenue, obviating all those problems related to 30/60/90/120-day payments that are very common in Italy-he explains, however, when they started out selling knitwear, they still ran into a number of difficulties mainly related to size, so then they switched to yarns, and there a world opened up to us– says Giovanni- after seven years we can now say that we are the absolute leader in Italy in our sector, offering a series of accessories and complements such as crochet hooks, snap hooks etc. that allow us to offer customers complete kits for their creations.

This name so international denotes the founder’s idea of wanting to make an international mark right away, in fact, they are currently working to open Tessiland’s first office in the US, which they plan to open within the following year.

Tessiland’s target customers consist mainly of ladies between 40 and 65 years old, thus a category of customers, not always experienced in browsing and shopping online, so the biggest bet to be won for this e-commerce, was to try to offer a user experience with as few clicks as possible and generally as simple as possible.

The Tessiland team also has a very clear key concept: providing transparent information and immediacy in the answer are two determining factors, especially in a market like Italy, where there is still not much culture of ‘online buying, if the customer does not find answers to his questions or if he faces complex navigation, it is easy for him to leave the e-commerce.  

Customer service is the flagship of Tessiland, they invest so much in this channel, training staff not only on the product side but also on a sociological level so that they can convey that feeling of trust to customers, providing information in a simple and clear way, depending on the type of user they interact with.  ¨It takes a lot of brand authority work and especially making sure that the experience is very simple and clear, which is also why we chose software like Oct8ne, which provides as physical an experience as possible, breaking the barrier of the screen¨. 

Online, the main thing to understand when you start a ‘business, is who you are addressing and in the case of our product, keep in mind that we are not selling a necessary product, so it is essential to be able to excite, create the need in the customer, all the more so in a historical moment like the one we are living now, between pandemics, wars, etc., so the videos, are that tool that allows you to get to the customer by giving them ideas on what to create with our products¨. All the people who appear in their corporate videos are part of Tessiland´s Team, trained on the product, communication professionals, and even experts in acting and theater to convey to their audience clarity and professionalism in everything that carries Tessiland brand.

Tessiland works mainly with Facebook, Youtube, but also with Instagram,  TikTok, and Pinterest where they promote ideas for handmade, a trend that is now also embracing a younger age group, so now things like crochet crafts are a trend, and ¨we are lucky because we picked up on this trend long ago, so to date we count with a wide range of crochet materials, which has also allowed us to position ourselves in the market, which is not easy for those who came later to identify this trend¨.

Nowadays, to be successful with an e-commerce, it is no longer enough to have competitive prices, you have to work on emotions, user experience and technology, provided that you have a valid, affordable, and quality product specially made in Italy.

Moreover, the checkout phase, which in itself is not an easy process because of all the various validation steps by the bank itself (3d secure etc) that make the payment long and complex, is a key moment to help the customer finalize the purchase. For this, they use the ‘help of the so-called Triggers, that are, automatic messages that in the concrete case of Tessiland, have allowed over three months, to offer help through chat, to 13.7% of customers at the checkout stage, without being intrusive and with the ‘goal in this specific case, to assist him during the finalization of the purchase process, avoiding one of the biggest vanishing points of e-commerce.

´A trigger is a great tool, we use the trigger on check out to reduce the number of abandoned carts, helping the customer finalize the purchase.´

Oct8ne´s visual support – the coviewer-, represents for Tessiland, a tool of double utility: for the agent to be able to see the path that the customer has taken, understand what he is looking for, and be able to show articles that during the navigation he did not find; and on the ‘other hand for the customer, who can through a smartphone, tablet and not only from desktop, show the photo of the article he is looking for

¨The coviewer brings an important added value to the purchasing process¨.

Like so many eCommerce businesses, Tessiland was faced with customer service and phone line saturated with frequently asked questions, mainly regarding order status. Despite automatically sending an email with order tracking link at  the moment the package leaves their warehouses, Tessiland customers, continued to contact the company by phone, asking for this type of information, highlighting that an email is still an unknown tool for many. 

Offering phone support, however, as the company’s founder himself confirms, in the long run, is really tiring for the agent who spends eight hours answering the same questions, so they realized that automating with a chatbot, a series of frequent answers that did not really need human attention, would allow their team to engage in conversations where personalized attention was needed and most importantly decrease the number of phone calls that were very high. 

At first, Giovanni explains, customers were a bit critical of the chatbot’s empathy, but then they realized, also thanks to the work we did through social media, that the chatbot allows us to offer her immediate assistance 24/seven.

He then adds ¨the simplicity with which the Oct8ne chatbot configurator is designed, allows it to be implemented with great ease, thanks to the system of drag-and-drop forms where you enter the questions and answers, in one evening I did the configuration which then your team colleagues optimized with automations such as order tracking¨. So now Tessiland customers,  can interact at any time of the day or night with the chatbot to get the information they are interested in. To give a numerical reference of how much the chatbot has agilized Tessiland’s customer service work, just consider that out of 8175 help requests received in a three-month period, the chatbot handled 8093. Of these 8175 help requests also, another interesting fact is that 6961 are conversations initiated spontaneously by the customer requesting assistance. 

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