How Fabelio is emphasising customer service in selling furnitures online

It offers features such as two-year product warranty and same-day deliveries for best sellers.

With Indonesia as one of the most vital furniture producers globally, opportunity was ripe for selling them in an online space. From here, e-commerce platform Fabelio was created, offering the idea of a design- and consumer-centric furniture brand. With a name being a contraction of the phrase “Furniture Awet Beli Online,” Fabelio sought to be a company that would offer beautiful, sturdy furniture at affordable prices and offer excellent customer service.

This reflects in their customer service features, such as a 24/7 customer service availability, 30-day money-back guarantee, two-year product warranty, digital payment, COD, 0% instalment with all banks, bank transfer and same-day deliveries for their best sellers. They also offer installation as a free service. With these, they hope to offer experiences that are not just painless, but also delightful.

Their technology developments are also focussed on customer experience, with heavy emphasis on last-mile logistics to reduce delivery times. Whilst last year less than 4% of their orders were delivered within 24 hours, today one out of five orders arrive at the customer the next day or even earlier.

“At Fabelio, we believe that our focus on customer experience is unique. We always look at the holistic customer journey and don’t see us as either online or offline and embrace the preferences of our customers. We are continually incorporating customer feedback into our decision-making process, and that’s reflected in all departments,” co-founder Christian Sutardi told Retail Asia.

For the past five years they have been scaling up and defining the fundamentals of what they call their “new retail” strategy, that combines online and offline touchpoints. With their series A funding, they were able to improve their tech stacks and experiment with this model, and by series B, they optimised their operations and began to build out their network of experience centres.

To date, Fabelio has experienced 82% YoY growth in customer acquisition, with more than 1,000 B2B projects, ranging from residential properties such as houses and apartments, offices to retail brands, such as Citraland, BRI and Jakarta MRT.

This was even accelerated during the pandemic, when they recorded their highest-ever online sales in April. Their local showrooms had to close, but they were able to overcome this challenge of answering to the customers’ need for experience through a virtual assistant. Through this, they offered more personalised services via live chats with service staff and also mobile platforms such as WhatsApp.

“With the pandemic forcing our local showrooms to close, we focused extensively on leveraging online marketing, digital accessibility and education for the new normal,” Sutardi said.

On top of this, they have continued to implement a 30-day return period, with a warranty period that was extended by up to two years. They also provided a variety of delivery process options, from the same day to the next day delivery.

“The future of eCommerce is brighter than ever, and the simultaneous ramp-up in payments and infrastructure will support this growth trajectory. Online sales increased by almost two times, compared with pre-pandemic sales,” they added.

Fabelio raised $9m as part of its series C round, bringing its total funding to more than $20m. With the fresh funding, they are looking to build their service area to the whole island of Java and Bali by the end of this year. They are also planning to expand to other major cities in early 2021. They will also invest in technology, which includes scaling up their current team of 40 engineers. They are primarily focussing to expand their assortment, as well as expand their stock availability to improve delivery times.

“We are planning to open up 10 new showrooms/experience centres this year in Indonesia and cover the whole island of Java by the end of 2020. This mainly refers to a vast assortment of products, a smooth website and an easily reachable network of experience centres,” Fabelio said.