PORTLAND, Maine — Wayfair’s aggressive play to acquire loyal customers in the United States and faster-growing markets abroad motivates the demand for hiring at two customer service centers the online furniture sales firm plans to open in Maine this summer.
The plan also includes a high-tech vision of the future of shopping, using mobile devices to envision what a piece of furniture might look like placed in a home, in three dimensions.
Liz Graham, Wayfair’s vice president of sales and service, described how the company’s overall strategy fuels its need for the facilities in Maine during a presentation Thursday to about 460 at the Maine International Trade Center’s annual Trade Day conference.
“Our customer support here is vital to our business,” Graham said. “We only have in-house support, so with the growth that we’ve had, we need more employees to support all of those customers.”
The company has started hiring for locations at a former L.L. Bean call center in Bangor and at a site at Brunswick Landing, where it plans to open in July and June, respectively. It ultimately plans to have 950 employees in Maine, with 450 in Bangor and 500 in Brunswick.
At the same time, the company plans this summer to unveil one of its technological innovations, with a mobile phone and tablet app that allows a customer to overlay and move a 3-D piece of furniture using a live view of their home.
On Thursday, Graham showed a demonstration video of the technology, which lets a person hold a mobile device up to a room, select a piece of furniture and where the application’s imaging technology should overlay the 3-D image.
The technology, Graham said, is one example of the innovations that make the company more than just a mail-order retailer but a technology company that’s trying to upend all parts of the process of shopping for home goods.
At this point, that effort is fueled by aggressive marketing and advertising, spending $278 million on advertising in 2015 to grow an active customer base of more than 6 million last year. With that growth, the company said in its most recent earnings statement that repeat orders also are up, meaning customers are coming back.
That larger customer base also helps the company better project future demand and tastes, using data to try and create another technological advantage over online retail competitors.
That generates lessons, such as finding Canadian shoppers prefer designs categorized as “contemporary,” “industrial” and “Scandinavian” more than in the United States, where more traditional and classic European styles — think dark wood, claw-footed items — are popular.
That knowledge also fuels some of its customer service efforts, which mix general customer service and more specialized services for repeat customers and business customers. With those specialized teams, Graham said, the company has found higher repeat purchases and higher profits per customer.
The company in April started hiring for its locations in Bangor, where it will have customer service staff, and Brunswick, where it plans to have staff for business-to-business sales, supplier relations and information technology support.