1. About NITORI
NITORI, Japan's beloved home furnishing brand, aims to bring a colorful home life to consumers and operates 67 stores across Taiwan.
NITORI adopted SurveyCake back in 2021, and is now in its fifth year of use. It has broken past the traditional limits of surveys and membership management, and uses data to build a clearer profile of its highest-loyalty members. Let's follow the SurveyCake editorial team to see exactly how SurveyCake helped NITORI transform successfully.
2. NITORI's Goals and Challenges
The wave of digital transformation is sweeping the globe, and every industry is investing in it. But digital transformation is not just about adopting new technology; it is a full overhaul of corporate thinking and operating models. Walk into a NITORI store, and after checkout, customers receive a receipt printed with a QR code. Scanning it and spending just one minute to respond earns a digital coupon or entry into an online lucky draw. This seemingly simple flow conceals NITORI's meticulous planning around membership management and omnichannel strategy.
Three Pain Points Drove NITORI to Seek Change
Before adopting SurveyCake, NITORI faced three major pain points in membership management and customer insight:
Challenge 1: Fragmented Online and Offline Channels Turned Purchase Data into Isolated Silos
NITORI operates multiple channels, including physical stores, an online store, and an app, but each channel had its own independent member ID with no way to connect the data. This left critical consumer data impossible to analyze as a whole, creating isolated data silos.
Challenge 2: Low ROI on Paper Surveys, and Technical Bottlenecks Building Their Own Online Survey
NITORI used to have store staff hand out paper surveys at store entrances, which consumed enormous labor and was relatively inefficient. Advertising and Promotion Manager Shen Wan-lin revealed that the cost to collect each paper survey ran as high as NT$100 (including labor, transportation, and gifts), and stores could only collect about 100 surveys a day.
To raise the response rate and lower costs, NITORI had separately planned a digital survey system, but ran into problems with incomplete data integration and a lack of incentive for respondents.
Challenge 3: Digitalizing Marketing Campaigns, but Outsourced Site-Building Ran into Limited Data Retention and Weak Security Standards
Spend-and-win lucky draws are an annual NITORI marketing campaign. Because physical raffle tickets are hard to track and analyze, these have all shifted to a digital format.
NITORI once tried outsourcing to a web development company to handle event registration, but ran into inflexibility, high costs for changes, and inadequate security standards. Most critically, the vendor's data retention period was only six months, which could not meet NITORI's need for campaigns that run a full year.
3. NITORI x SurveyCake: Three Enterprise Solutions
Facing these challenges, here is how NITORI worked with SurveyCake to build three enterprise-grade solutions tailored to retail. Through SurveyCake Enterprise, NITORI connected its surveys to multiple systems and applied survey data intelligently, saving on labor costs and fully automating even seemingly complex consumer lucky draws.
✦ 1. Smart POS Integration: Simplifying Responses and Raising the Response Rate
To solve its data integration limitations and prevent purchase data from becoming useless records, NITORI chose to work with SurveyCake.
After adopting SurveyCake Enterprise, NITORI connected its survey system to the customer database in its POS system. After checkout, customers receive a personal QR code, and the survey automatically pre-fills their customer information, dramatically cutting response time and successfully raising the response rate.
(Caption: NITORI connects its survey system to the customer database in its POS system, giving each customer a personal QR code.)
✦ 2. Cutting Survey Costs in Half While Dramatically Raising Conversion
NITORI also chose SurveyCake because it wanted to lower the cost of paper surveys and build a more complete membership strategy through data.
Advertising and Promotion Manager Shen Wan-lin revealed that compared to paper surveys, adopting SurveyCake cut survey costs by at least 60% and raised the response rate by 166%. Even better, 30% of respondents made a repeat purchase using the digital coupon they received for completing the survey, significantly raising customer lifetime value (LTV).
(Caption: After adopting SurveyCake, NITORI's survey response rate rose 166% and costs dropped more than 60%.)
✦ 3. Solving Security and Data Retention Limits, Finding Strategy in Consumer Feedback
SurveyCake carries security standards trusted by Fortune 500 companies, with visual charts and word cloud analysis that sync in real time as responses come in, helping NITORI easily grasp consumer insight.
Limited by the paper survey format in the past, NITORI could only collect information through checkbox questions. After adopting SurveyCake, NITORI began successfully collecting more written feedback as well. Through the word cloud feature, NITORI quickly discovered that many consumers were complaining that store aisles were too narrow, seriously affecting the in-store experience. NITORI quickly compiled the feedback, made adjustments, and successfully improved the aisle design. "SurveyCake means we no longer run stores on instinct alone. We let the data speak," said Manager Shen of the Advertising and Promotion Department.
4. Results: Looking Ahead, Deepening the OMO Membership Strategy
NITORI understands the 80/20 rule of membership management (that 80% of revenue comes from 20% of customers), so the brand aims to cultivate high-loyalty customers and keeps deepening its OMO positioning.
Through data integration, NITORI has consolidated omnichannel member data into a single ID, giving it a fuller picture of the customer and full visibility into the behavior of its highest-loyalty customers. At the same time, NITORI will keep investing resources in its LINE Official Account, using SurveyCake's integration with LINE to build a 360-degree omnichannel membership solution.
Maximizing Enterprise Communication with SurveyCake ENTERPRISE
NITORI's partnership with SurveyCake perfectly illustrates that digital transformation is not just about knowing how to operate digital tools; it is about having a data mindset, letting data speak, and gaining real-time insight to solve an industry's underlying pain points. From paper to cloud, from intuition-based to data-based decisions, NITORI's success story shows how SurveyCake empowers enterprises so that a "survey" is no longer just a marketing tactic, but a key contributor to digital transformation strategy.
SurveyCake ENTERPRISE Helps You Capture the Membership Data That Matters Most
To learn more about survey applications in retail membership management, or if you are interested in the SurveyCake ENTERPRISE plan, contact us. Fill out the Enterprise trial form and a specialist will reach out to understand your organization's needs and ideas.
