Jonathan Clark: Roomle Rubens has been with Shelved from day one

Our drive to choose the configurator was driven primarily by product complexity. With a potentially infinitely configurable product we needed a solution that put our customers in control of the design stage. The knock-on effect of this is a requirement for live pricing, BOM generation, accurate 3D visualisations and a seamless link into our e-commerce platform. Roomle offered all of this and became an easy choice of specification for us.

Roomle has been with Shelved from day one.
The potential complexity of our system was prohibitive in launching without a well-designed, robust configurator tool. We do offer pre-designed units alongside our ‘design your own’ solution, and see a roughly 50/50 split between these order types. What we do see is fantastic feedback on the configurator and an increase in average order value for configurations designed by the customer.

We had the personnel to make this viable. Our developer, Mike Todd, was able to grasp the technical coding side of the Roomle platform and quickly start to develop and iterate versions of the configurator. We are on version 2 now and each version has taken close to a years development time. We recognise that outsourcing this work to large teams could have been quicker but the fact that Mike sits in the same room as every day makes testing, developing and iterating the stages of development so much faster and cleaner.

Communication is key and having the development skill in the business has been absolutely key to that.

It hasn’t yet, but we recognise the value and benefit that product configurators can offer. Both for our customers but also internally in terms of error reduction.

It’s a huge positive and is something that’s routinely commented on by our customers. Selling online is difficult, especially when it comes to furniture, the AR functionality goes some way to breaking down this barrier and giving confidence to the customer.

We hope to expand into some export markets as we’re limited to the UK only at present. We also want to develop more systems of furniture to expand on what we’ve become known for – high quality, highly customisable modular storage furniture. I believe we will see 3D configurators as a key element of what we do next, the customer journey and flexibility they offer is fantastic and offers a more involved customer journey that fosters more buy-in, brand loyalty and a sense of ownership for what they have designed. In terms of AI, certainly there are benefits for customer service requests and live chat tools, and the coding assistance available now is fantastic in supporting Mike in his work.