“We want our customers to have the best shopping experience possible! It’s that simple; from start to finish, we want you to enjoy shopping with us!”

Vaughan Shoes proudly displays the Retail Excellence “National Online Retailer of the Year, 2020” banner across their website. Any why wouldn’t they? It’s a fantastic accolade and a great reward for a job well done. However, as any successful person, in any walk of life knows, success doesn’t come over night. It takes a lot of hard work and diligence. For a business, it’s about developing a business plan and trying your best to implement that plan and strategy. It’s about trying to make the right decision at every turn along the way.

Let’s turn back the clock a little. In 2014, Vaughan Shoes had just opened their 3rd store. Business was thriving and it was obvious that the “bricks and mortar” business was producing real returns. However, not to rest on their laurels, and being very forward thinking, the management team at Vaughan Shoes were already planning to invest more in an online strategy. The shift to mobile was starting to take place and management knew they had to embrace it.

GOAL (2015): To replicate the physical shopping experience for our online customers

This was going to be a tough task but the team at Vaughan’s had a plan. “We knew that driving traffic to the website wasn’t going to be enough. We needed to engage with our customers once they were there.”

Donal Vaughan, Managing Director, Vaughan Shoes

Vaughan Shoes implemented Chatify (previously Pubble) in 2017.

Answer Bot

“Chatify has a nice piece of AI technology integrated into the platform. This allows us to pre-populate answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). We get quite a few questions around delivery, for example. By having the answers ready, it means that if customers are browsing our website in the evening time or at busy times throughout the day when an agent isn’t available, it’s still potentially possible for us to answer to their question. The automation helps with that all-important engagement piece. This is very powerful”.

Donal Vaughan, Managing Director, Vaughan Shoes

By providing an amazing online customer experience, Vaughan Shoes has achieved double digit growth year on year since implementing their 2015 strategy.

The Vaughan Shoes Case Study is available to download here: