Customer Experience

By adaptive - November 13th, 2013

Peter Farrell, Director, Social Media & Marketing, QVC, Inc.

QVC was founded in 1986 by Joseph Segel, an entrepreneur who saw an opportunity to create a new and engaging shopping experience through television broadcasts. He named the company QVC to represent its three guiding principles: Quality, Value, and Convenience.

Today, QVC is the world's leading video and e-commerce retailer, offering a curated collection of desirable brands to millions of customers around the globe each day through broadcast, Internet, and mobile sales platforms. QVC's 2012 sales generated $8.5 billion in annual revenues, $2.9 billion of which came from e-commerce.

Until recently, Peter was running the Brand Development group at QVC driving advertising and brand strategy. He led the re-launch of their brand, which included a complete refresh of the corporate identity look and feel. In 2008, Peter created a business unit focused on strategic planning to help position the company for long-term success. The same year he launched the company's social media program where he was able to direct the team's growth and strategy increasing the effectiveness and ROI of their efforts.

What are the key drivers behind QVC’s use of social media?

QVC is creating an experience that reimagines the worlds of shopping, entertainment and social as one. The key driver for social media at QVC is to enhance and extend our customer relationships and to help create an immersive 360-degree experience across platforms.

Customers are invited to engage with QVC through community forums, our social media and commerce platforms, the QVC apps, ratings and reviews, on-air testimonial calls, special live events held around the country and so on. However, the customer chooses to engage with QVC, we invite them to co-create the experience with us.

What organizationalmodels do you use and why?

We have a centralized strategy that is distributed in a decentralized way. We have key stakeholders who advise on our overarching social strategy, yet the teams across the business are empowered to act using our company values and shared strategy as a guide post.

How does your company value the networks it has a presence on?

We value anything that allows us to connect with and serve our customers in a better and more meaningful way. Of course, we have to evaluate where to put our energy, so we cannot chase every new network that emerges. QVC is a relationship-oriented business, so platforms that allow us to deepen and extend the relationships we have with customers are of most interest to us.

Can you outline a recent initiative that included a social media component?

In September, we launched a new social commerce platform called toGather. toGather is an online gathering place that brings together QVC’s vibrant and vocal community made up of our passionate customers, our network personalities and the people behind our famous brands.

Millions of customers tune into QVC each day to be entertained and discover compelling new products from across the globe. toGather takes that same experience online, allowing our customers to share their finds, ideas and tips, and discover something new every day. That discovery is driven through a stream of recommendations and stories from people they trust.

For our large-scaled remote broadcast productions, such as “Red Carpet STYLE” live from LA during the awards season, we use social media to bring customers behind the scenes and as close to the action as possible.

At our most recent Red Carpet event, we used Instagram to create buzz and engage customers. As part of this, we invited 25 of LA’s top Instagrammers and asked them to share their experience through instagram. Through this, we reached 79 million impressions and QVC was a top trending hashtag on Twitter (unsponsored) and a top image on Instagram’s Explore page (unsponsored).

How did your organization approach the mapping of your enterprise to identify where social media should reside in the corporate structure?

In our case, we launched the social program in 2007 when I was the director of brand marketing. From there we quickly began identifying all the areas across the business that could benefit from using social communication channels and partnered with leaders from the different business units to help us a champion a more formal and unified strategy.

This strategy was presented to leadership and was quickly embraced. By bringing multiple business units together to get a holistic understanding of how social media could support the business, we were able to foster a highly collaborative and streamlined approach to the program.

What is your advice to organizations that are beginning to map their own corporate structure with the view to embedding social media activity within their enterprise?

Find champions. Get together and start dreaming about how embedding social into your business could benefit the connection that you have with your customers. Talk to other companies out there, go to conferences, and learn from others who have done this.

I think it can be beneficial to have an outside service provider that specializes in social media to help you out in the beginning. The right provider is bringing experience from brands they’ve helped across multiple categories of business, so the lessons they can share are invaluable as you begin to map out the right approach for your business and brand.

How do you see the management and development of social media in your company evolving over the next few years?

I think there is a lot of potential to leverage social media technology internally to increase productivity and collaboration. Insight and innovation can be unlocked with some of the tools that exist today and we will continue exploring them to get better at what we do.