Projects: Extremely Clever Corporate Comms At Blinds.com

February 26, 2015 by Dave Haynes

This is soooooo clever.

Blinds.com, an online seller of guess what, has a very sharp guy named Brad Parler who has put together an internal corporate communications network  like none other I have seen in digital signage.

Forget about bland Excel charts or leaderboards that are just names and numbers. The Blinds.com guys took their cue from sports broadcasters and do sales and customer touch information like Fox does NFL player profiles.

Customer-facing staff have been green-screened and layered into videos that show who is excelling on the sales or customer contact floor in Houston – using the same kind of fun swagger you see with a wide receiver showing his season stats.

The system runs on Signagelive, and has a number of other features, like social media feedback, you will see in the video below. And one more time, with feeling, I will not how a video is immensely more powerful as a marketing vehicle than a press release. They cost more, but done well, easily drive ROI.

Here’s the press release:

Blinds.com, the world’s largest online windows covering provider, has implemented a digital signage solution, powered by Signagelive, in its busy customer services centre to motivate employees and to enhance internal communications. Signagelive’s cloud-based software is being used to automate content delivery processes to more than 70 displays and to manage dynamically updated social media feeds containing customer feedback on four 75” Samsung Commercial displays, referred to internally as The Voice.

Blinds.com, a Home Depot company, has been covering over a million windows a year since 1996. With a cutting edge online ordering system and ‘The Window Shopper’ augmented reality shopping app, Blinds.com makes ordering custom blinds, shades, shutters and draperies a no brainer with huge savings and selection. Blinds.com offers installation videos, award winning customer service and a SureFit Guarantee to make buying blinds online surprisingly easy and stress-free.

Productivity and accountability are key drivers in customer service centres and prior to Signagelive Blinds.com was dependent on antiquated communications processes and a variety of standalone systems to update staff on performance, targets and HR information. Not only was this an inefficient use of resource, communicated information was not consistent because of the time needed to remotely log into individual PCs, Netbooks and AV screens located throughout the premises.

Brad Parler, the company’s Digital Communications Administrator, investigated the possibility of implementing a digital signage system to improve internal communications. Signagelive was selected as the preferred software provider because of its simplicity and multi-vendor support. Signagelive is also cloud-based, which offers significant cost savings compared to conventional digital signage solutions.

The Signagelive-powered system has provided Blinds.com with a centralised network to manage its motivational messaging and social media feeds. Displayed content, which is a combination of staff videos (created by Blinds.com) performance-related facts, and social media feeds are managed centrally using intuitive advanced scheduling tools.

Team leaders can use Signagelive to quickly compile sales stats, such as best average sales value, best sales conversion rate, star performer of the month and communicate this information on a company-wide basis in real-time, which improves performance and engagement. Signagelive is also used to dynamically manage multiple social media feeds (sourced by Zoomph.com) displayed on a 4 x 75” videowall.

Comments Brad Parler, Digital Communications Administrator of Blinds.com: “The emotional impact digital signage has had on our staff has been phenomenal; it is a great motivator because they all want to see their name in the limelight and be recognized as star performer of the month. The three key points that convinced senior personnel at Blinds.com to invest in Signagelive were the ability to schedule updates, have players sync and play the same assets at the same time and ability to mix HTML and AV assets on the same playlist to create eye-catching content.”

This will win awards.