Natuzzi uses Dynamics 365 to redefine the luxury furniture experience with a data-first approach

Business challenge

Over the past decade, Natuzzi has seen a rapid global expansion of their heralded luxury brand. The shift has broadened their customer base to a younger, online-first buyer and even drawn the praise of industry influencers. While this expanded presence has been welcomed by Natuzzi, their roots are in their in-store personalized luxury experiences that their core customers have come to love and expect from the design-driven furniture manufacturer. 

Natuzzi, who is driven to create harmony in the home, wanted to ensure that as they scale, they bring that same harmony to every customer and influencer no matter how they interact. This meant they needed to prepare for the next chapter of Natuzzi, creating bespoke experiences for every audience regardless of being in-person at one of the more than 1,200 retail touchpoints, eleven commercial offices, or simply visiting one of their many e-commerce sites.

Natuzzi wants to provide customers with an elevated experience, that rises above the typical marketing noise, and evokes the same sense of sophistication and beauty they had become known for. Natuzzi does not just want to deliver furniture; instead, they aspire to deliver harmony to customers. Their vision was to completely reimagine all their experiences from new concept store design, to revamping customer service, to staff skilling and technology. 

To make that vision a reality, they looked to Microsoft Dynamics 365 to bring together previously disconnected systems and provide an end-to-end system capable of delivering harmonious experiences. Natuzzi determined that Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing were precisely what they needed to get a holistic view of the customers worldwide and engage customers thoughtfully, at the right time, and in the channel of their choice. 

“We want to bring beauty and timeless harmony to people around the world. Working with Microsoft Dynamics 365 enables us to deliver a well-crafted experience and empower our entire global team,” says Antonio Achille, CEO of Natuzzi.

To create harmony in their experiences, Natuzzi wanted to:

• Create a one-to-one relationship with each customer.
• Engage each audience in the right moments throughout their journey regardless of channels.
• Integrate with loyalty management processes to drive higher lifetime value. 

Early use of Power BI enabled Natuzzi to gather and visualize information to gain deep insights into concerns such as inventory management and customer behavior and arrive at better business decisions. Even with this in place, Natuzzi lacked one key piece of the puzzle: a customer engagement platform capable of unifying data from its retail Point of Sale (POS) System, ERP, and Dynamics 365. The company also wanted a way to bring together its B2B and B2C related data sets to drive greater insight between audiences. By enabling business teams to easily create targeted segments based on insights directly from the customer data and activate journeys using this intelligence, Natuzzi would be able to deliver a harmonious and enjoyable experience that could surprise and delight customers throughout the buying process and beyond.

Natuzzi started by bringing together demographic, transactional, and behavioral data from both internal and external data sources into a unified customer data platform: Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. For the first time, Natuzzi was able to get a 360-degree view of key data points for each customer, connecting purchase histories, website interaction data, campaign engagement data, CRM data, brand affinities, and more. This enabled them to gain new insights into each audience, develop precise segments, and create highly personalized engagement journeys that engage customers across channels in Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Thanks to this new and extensive customer experience platform, Natuzzi can now offer customers, prospects, and trade partners a tailored experience through physical channels, events, visits to its flagship store franchisees and wholesalers, and engagements on its digital e-commerce platform. Natuzzi’s marketing and digital organizations can also follow customer operations company-wide to maintain and improve the global customer data, strategize using shared business insights, and deliver more impactful engagement plans.

Business use cases and scenarios

Natuzzi has transformed the way its luxury brand discovers and sustains its customers—delivering an experience that feels as elegant as the furniture it creates. It uses customer data and insights to nurture customers and prospects through personalized campaigns, delivering emails, SMS texts, promotions, events, sales appointment reminders, and other relationship-building messages. Equally important, Natuzzi has gained the ability to build operational cooperation between headquarters and locations quickly, thoroughly, and productively.

As Natuzzi is focused on cross- and up- selling to its active customer base as well as expanding the base to new audiences and geographies, Natuzzi uses a variety of data measures to identify and engage key audience segments such as:

• Incoming contacts from digital channels, grouped by various attributes such as area of interest and geography or type of request and age.
• Active clients that have ordered in the last three months in more than two lines of products and grouped by store (coverage area).
• Inactive, potentially high Life-Time Value (LTV) customers.

New digital customers

Thanks to Dynamics 365, all new contacts coming from digital channels like e-commerce and Natuzzi websites are intercepted and managed with specific customer journeys. Each journey is designed to create curiosity in the recipient while enabling Natuzzi to learn more about each customer, their interests and what stimulates them. Leveraging measures, Natuzzi groups new contacts into clusters created out of a rich combination, including age, geography, area of interest (living room, dining room, bedroom), type of action (request for quotation, request for meeting, event registration), and more. This enables Natuzzi to curate a “liquid” journey that nurtures customers in a personalized way without over communication.  

Natuzzi successfully used the brand enrichment capabilities for its new initiatives and the e-commerce shop in the US market that launched December 2021. This allowed the company to leverage the related brand affinity score of competitors for even better targeting.

Reengagement campaigns

Natuzzi makes decisions based on data and insights of its main business drivers, such as purchase history or interests shown. It also creates campaigns that provide customers with direct contact with the main novelties of the brand and most relevant products, including receiving emails and promotions that engage them and fuel the next best actions toward purchasing. Engagement is tailored to the local level, spending potential, product collection, and so forth. One example is a recent campaign Natuzzi pulled together in just two weeks to reengage customers who had purchased 10 years ago. Data showed 35% of customers were interested in reconnecting with the brand, and in relevant markets they saw a near-term increase for in-store appointments.   

Digital event execution

The pandemic altered Natuzzi’s event strategy to include new digital events. This provided them with opportunities to launch new products in “digital mode” to gain feedback quickly and easily compare product trends. Natuzzi was able to dynamically target customers for increased level of participation and quality of participants, as well as journey personalization. 

Milan Design Week engagement

Post-pandemic, Natuzzi has increased in-person event engagement significantly, from in-store appointments to major participation in the Milan Design Week—where they exceeded their goals four-fold. They used a variety of highly tailored journeys to drive both the pre- and post-event engagement with customers and influencers. For instance, they used data to deliver different calls-to-action, such as pushing broad audiences to engage on social versus scheduling a follow up with a high propensity customer in their local store (if in a region with one) or connecting a VIP influencer with the right person during the show. This enabled them to prioritize and focus limited brand ambassador resources to drive the highest business results based on factors such as potential lifetime value (LTV), location, or brand affinities. Natuzzi was also able to grow their first party customer data significantly, collecting a similar amount of data in just 4 to 5 days that had previously taken two years in a typical retail location.

Trade leads to purchase  

In the rapidly growing contract manufacturing space, Natuzzi is able to capture leads and better understand their interests, needs, and potential value so they can be engaged in the right way by the right person. With Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Sales leveraging the same customer data, their sales and marketing teams have been able to learn which campaigns are most impactful and work together to drive engagement for the highest value customers.

Iterating for greater impact

The Dynamics 365 implementation project started in January 2021, went live in April 2021, and has grown significantly over the past two years. Central to its success was replacing many previously siloed SAS solutions and manual processes. Natuzzi has benefited from a platform approach, leveraging Dynamics Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Dynamics 365 Sales to more deeply connect its marketing strategies and sales processes into a harmonious experience. Key to success was the strong collaboration between Natuzzi’s champion team, which was comprised of marketing and IT professionals, and the Microsoft Engineering organization.

Natuzzi has input approximately 40 million source records from over a dozen sources including marketing interactions, CRM data, Point-of-Sale (POS) data, and more. This includes leveraging customer data from Natuzzi’s data warehouse from legacy systems, such as purchase transactions, line orders, quotations, historical campaign data, and survey data.

Over 350 dynamic segments have been created and are activated into direct marketing campaigns and leveraged for tailored personalization both in digital channels and in showrooms and events.

In addition, Natuzzi has implemented Dynamics 365 Customer Service to deliver personalized support engagement and more efficiently leverage the same core data set, enabling them to better support the check-out phase on e-commerce with self-service, live chat, and scaling to voice and video calls as needed, especially during the pandemic. Natuzzi has also leveraged Dynamics 365 Field Service to deliver empathetic, connected service on-site when needed. These investments are helping to drive higher retention.

Business value

Dynamics 365 has quickly had an impact on Natuzzi’s business. Pierangelo Colacicco, Chief Information Technology and Digital Innovation Officer at Natuzzi, observes that since starting the project in April 2021, the stores are performing measurably better. “In a disjointed selling environment, we can follow each customer much better with improved ongoing messaging, promotions, and events. With targeted campaigns, we are moving contacts to prospects and prospects to customers. Luxury furniture is a complicated market, and this keeps us close to our customers and on top of market trends,” says Colacicco. 

To deliver on Natuzzi’s brand promise with each audience, building direct, personalized relationships is critical. To enable this, Natuzzi has prioritized developing its first party data including customer profiles, which have grown from 387,000 unified customer profiles to nearly 650,000, up 68% over the last two years.

Natuzzi’s “Harmony Makers” around the world are now able to invest more time and passion in delivering on their brand promise rather than jumping between a number of legacy tools. The marketing team now has a common language around customer data and a single toolset to execute, running precisely targeted campaigns, and adjusting based on how the activations are working. The sales team can provide individual offers based on the customer journeys and demographic data that were previously unavailable. Service can use the full history of the customer to better tailor support.  Everyone can take advantage of a global capability set and previously unattainable insights to deliver curated local experiences based on the specific market while leveraging learnings from around the globe.

Next steps

The company continues to extend its implementation to deliver more harmony with additional capability. Natuzzi aims to distribute richer insights through adapting AI models, further enriching customer data cards, point-of-sale apps, increasing the use of real-time journey capabilities and new AI feature areas, such as natural language segmentation and generative content creation. This will enable their teams to more efficiently scale personalized engagement.

Natuzzi is well on their way to delivering sophisticated experiences in keeping with the furniture they create—inspired, more connected, and at harmony with the people and world around us. “Dynamics 365 is helping us to build an even more direct relationship with our customers throughout the world, and to bring harmony to the homes of millions of people,” states Colacicco. 

Throughout the years, the exclusiveness of luxury brands has been both their appeal and their weakness—as it is difficult to scale these kinds of human connections. With the Dynamics 365 customer engagement platform, Natuzzi is leading the way by successfully delivering a harmonious experience that puts customers at the center of their finely crafted furniture and delivers growth across their business.