Our Newest Retail Innovation

In the years before I started Saatva, I was on a founding team that built a chain of more than 200 home furnishings retail stores around the country. A big part of my job was traveling from store to store, training the managers and sales staff. The pattern was always the same: If I arrived on a Saturday afternoon the place was humming, filled with customers, and buzzing with energy. But if I showed up on Thursday morning, when traffic was lighter and there were just a couple of salespeople on the floor? You could often hear a pin drop.?

When we began planning the design of Saatva’s brick-and-mortar Viewing Rooms, I was determined to capture some of the excitement that appeals to me as a shopper—I wanted that Saturday afternoon feeling all the time. To create it, we invented a new retail role, one that reimagines the traditional in-store salesperson for the modern digital age.?

We call it a “flex customer service representative.” Because Saatva is an e-commerce business, we have CSRs on duty around the clock. But instead of answering phones and helping customers from our New York call center, the flex CSRs sit in our retail Viewing Rooms, fully integrated into the customer experience. It has been an incredibly successful innovation that we are scaling up as we expand our presence across the country.?

The “always on” buzz that comes from phones ringing and the chatter of CSRs working creates exactly the ambiance we were going for. It’s never boring in a Saatva Viewing Room, whether you show up on a weekend afternoon or a weekday morning. But that’s not the only benefit.

It showcases the strength of the brand. When you walk into one of our Viewing Rooms, you’re not just entering a four-wall retail store. We like to say you’re walking into a physical manifestation of our website. Having the CSRs on-site, answering calls from customers anywhere in the country, reflects the power of our always-on, national brand.?

It reinforces our values. We are a brand that believes in transparency, in our products, and in our practices. Any visitor can see and hear what our calls sound like, whether a rep is helping someone place an order for one of our mattresses or coordinating a delivery with a customer. You’re seeing our business in action—there is no “behind the scenes.”?

It’s efficient. From a cost standpoint, we are already paying for the square footage of the Viewing Room, which means that adding the flex CSR function allows us to increase the volume of business we are able to do from that location without adding to our costs.? Our staffing is always just right: The flex CSRs are on-site to help out when things get busy—that’s the “flex” part of the job—and when the rush quiets down they pivot back to their other role, helping customers over the phone.?

It makes our staff stronger. Regardless of whether a representative spends most of their time on calls or interacting directly with customers, simply being in the Viewing Room, where they can see how shoppers experience our products and hear the questions they ask, makes them better at doing their jobs.?

It puts customer service front and center. When we started Saatva, we wanted to deliver the best customer service that anyone had ever seen in the mattress industry—an industry that had a reputation for a terrible customer experience. That combination of old-fashioned service with modern digital convenience is what put us on the map and continues to fuel our success. Without our customer service representatives, Saatva wouldn’t be the company it is today, and I’m proud to see them take their place at center stage.?