2. 3
4
The Age of the Informed Customer
Getting to Know the Customer
7 Clienteling Drives Brand Loyalty
10 The Customer’s Journey
11 Building a Foundation for Repeat Business
17 Connected Retail Delivers Real Benefits
19 The Business Value of Clienteling
3. 3
Today’s empowered fashion consumer is driving the retail agenda. With shopping now a 24/7 experience, their loyalty is
waning, while expectations are constantly on the rise. Brick-and-mortar retailers once dominated the retail landscape, but
today their failure to meet these new consumer expectations is one of the main reasons contributing to the decline in brand
loyalty. On the other hand, the rise in social and mobile technologies has led to the success of innovative stores, who have
redefined brand-customer interaction.
The all-knowing customers today have the ability to research and compare product prices, and read reviews before making a
purchase decision. They have the option to make their purchases from retailers across the globe, without ever setting foot in a
store. Once the purchasing decision is made, they can share their shopping experiences - positive or negative - with friends,
family and even strangers via social media. Most importantly, these technologies have allowed consumers to define how they
want to be engaged – but, is the retailer listening?
Clienteling brings brands closer to customers, regardless of the channel, by gathering data across touch points to generate
a positive experience for the omni-present customer. Fashion retailers are now understanding the need to adopt clienteling
as part of their brand building strategy, as it helps to empower sales associates to create engaging customer experiences.
However, it is not limited to in-store interaction alone; instead it serves as a tool for consistent interaction and communication
across all geographies and sales channels. Sales associates leveraging clienteling can 1
increase in-store traffic by 6% with a
1
24% increase in conversion rate, while a well-executed clienteling strategy can increase repeat business by 1
33%.
The Age of the Informed Customer
4. 4
World-class customer experience is a fundamental objective in today’s retailing environment. Customers are in control,
expecting an experience targeted to meet their needs and wants. With technological advancements, customers are smart,
well-informed and realize that they are in control. To service this focused customer, fashion retailers have embraced customer
experience management, where they observe and attempt to translate and synchronize customer interactions, across all
touch points. To become a fully integrated omni-channel organization, the list of challenges that retailers face is considerable,
but can be broadly categorized under three themes.
Getting to Know the Customer
Organizational and Ownership
The status quo of siloed online and offline groups avert innovative omni-channel programs from witnessing the light
of day. There are many stakeholders involved in the strategy and execution of an omni-channel business model.
The most prominent are the CMO, eCommerce, Head of Omni-channel, CIO, Head of Sales, and Head of Supply
Chain. The reality lies in understanding that only a few retailers have completely dismantled their marketing silos and
implemented a single retail clienteling platform, along with an appropriate organizational structure for all sales,
regardless of the channel.
5. 5
Technology and Integration
2
40% of retailers have indicated that they face complications in integrating back-office technology across channels.
This is visible in an instance where there is a need to have a consolidated, accurate view of real-time inventory across
stores and distribution centers. Executing this capability, however, is inherently complex and requires a retail order
management system to be integrated with existing legacy POS, eCommerce, ERP and retail mainframe systems.
Although retailers have aggressive technology investment plans to enable the rollout of omni-channel programs, the
implementation timelines are often lengthy. As a result, many retailers are simply paralyzed; unable to implement
simple capabilities like in-store pickups for online orders, despite the fact that this is now a basic expectation of
today’s new breed of consumers.
Operational and Execution
3
40% of retailers reported that store associate training is a major obstacle to achieving omni-channel success. The
main reason for this is the transformation of the in-store sales associate’s role, from a product expert to a brand
ambassador, product evangelist, customer service advocate and distribution specialist. A handful of retailers have made
the necessary training investments to enable their store associates to effectively perform these tasks.
6. 6
The resulting improvements in consumer
experience and loyalty leads to a differentiating
consumer and brand value, which inadvertently
increases traffic and revenue.
Leading brands are deploying an omni-channel
retail strategy, by digitally empowering in-store
employees to gather and receive information,
browse available products and form a more
personal relationship with customers.
In today’s connected world, where people
walking down the street with a smart-device in
their hand is a common sight, 69%4
of customers
shopping in a physical store expect store
employees to use a mobile device to enhance
the brand-customer relationship.
Call
Center
CRM
Social
Media
Store
Traffic Data
e-Commerce
Loyalty
Program
Customer
Catalog
In-Store
Clienteling
Customer Touch Points
It’s about the customer
7. 7
Successful clienteling begins with defining a process for better and personalized interaction with customers, enabled by a
platform that gathers customer data across every touch point. This 360 degree customer-centric model delivers real value
through the optimization of customer relationships, and reinforces best practices in sales associates, thus resulting in increased
customer spending and store revenue growth.
A 360 view of the customer is critical and requires accessibility to real-time purchase and behavioral information across all
touch points. This information is held in a cross-channel ‘Customer Relationship Management’ (CRM) repository or customer
data hub, which provides a single view of the customer and can be utilized to develop one-to-one marketing programs.
Clienteling Drives Brand Loyalty
clienteling
• Integrated monitoring and measurement
• Relevant and timely follow-up with the customer
• Targeted and relevant customer engagement and outreach
• Empowering sales associates to provide an exceptional in-store customer experience
8. 8
Key Elements of Clienteling
Targeted Customer Engagement and Outreach
Clienteling’s first goal is to reach out and engage customers in a personalized manner to drive traffic into the store.
By identifying key information and taking appropriate action, a clienteling strategy will be of high value to retailers
and brands alike. Knowing a customer’s preferences for a specific brand by taking a look at their purchase history is
a good practice to notify them of new product lines.
Sales Associate Empowerment
Once customers are in the store, clienteling empowers sales associates with better information about their products
and customers. It delivers the power of eCommerce to sales associates, including deep product content, cross-selling
suggestions and enterprise inventory visibility across distribution centers and stores for direct home delivery.
9. 9
Timely Customer Follow-up
Clienteling, when done effectively, also means following-up with the customer. Engaging with a customer in an
appropriate way, based on the customer’s contact preferences is the best way to bring the customer back for more.
Notifying them about upcoming store events, offers and promotions, which are personalized through their brand
preferences and styles, ensures continuous footfall to the store.
Integrated Monitoring & Measurement
Clienteling has the ability to track and measure processes, providing a sound basis for optimizing the effectiveness
of customer engagement and brand experience efforts. Sales associates view a dashboard that provides
feedback on the number of assigned tasks, percentage completed, and completed on time statistics with links to
drill down to individual task details. In addition, they can monitor and measure their sales bookings performance at
month and year-to-date level.
10. 10
The Customer’s Journey
A customer journey that reaps positive results/benefits for brands/retailers essentially consists of four stages. The stages are
as follows:
1. Customer Discovery
A customer’s interaction with a product or service has
varying levels and the first of these articulates around the
principle of discovery. In retail, the discovery process is
essential to the customer service experience based on
the level of service the customer receives. However,
we can also apply this principle of discovery to ‘brand
recognition.’
2. User Engagement in the Customer Experience
Customer engagement flows unsurprisingly from
awareness, but this takes the concept of awareness a
step further. This is where you meet your customer;
determine their priorities, their needs, what their
perceptions and expectations are. This is exactly what a
customer expects from brands/retailers.
3. Persuasion in the Customer Experience
This is the final step that leads up to the agreement
of the sale. By strategic application of persuasion, a
brand/retailer can achieve the final goal of establishing
and creating reliability, thus resulting in a solidified bond
through this process.
4. The Impact of Your Service/Product on Customers
Following persuasion is the experience the customer
has when using the product/service. A customer
retention expert maintains dialog and follows-up with
the customer. By ensuring that the customer life-cycle
does not come to an end simply with a purchase,
brands are able to create a positive customer experience
susceptible to growth and a more forgiving customer.
11. 11
Building a Foundation for Repeat Business
Start with the implementation of a customer-centric foundation with the ability to enable and support proven best practices
for in-store clienteling, multi-channel campaign management and analytics specifically focused on providing fashion retailers
with a shared view of the customer. This shared view of the customer must include all customer touch points including the
customer’s profile, preferences, purchase history and social media feed along with POS, inventory and product data across all
channels.
Customer-Centric Foundation
In-Store
Clienteling
Social
Media
Loyalty
Program
Online
Commerce
Marketing
Analytics Customer
12. 12
Deliver a ‘Best Practice’ approach to enhance the customer experience:
yy Breakdown internal organizational silos that limit cross-channel shopper engagement
Bring together all departments impacting the ‘customer experience’. It should enroll the key players, so those left out
cannot block a change and also show credibility and commitment of senior leadership to the rest of the organization.
Ensure everyone understands the inter-dependencies between departments and the effect on the customers’
experience. Work as a team to improve the end-to-end customer experience.
yy Establish clear goals that bridge the gap between a customer’s expectations and existing capabilities
Assessing the strength of your competitors is a critical function of business strategy and omni-channel planning. However,
a larger opportunity exists by focusing on the specific needs of your customers. Retailers should be actively engaging their
customer base through primary and secondary research to understand their omni-channel needs today and in the future.
Based on the specific needs of your customers, retailers can then establish a set of clear goals and success metrics.
yy Create success metrics and incentive structures that drive results
Retailers are still struggling with aligning teams on a singular set of success metrics that match the needs of the
omni-present customer. By revisiting their incentive structures in all channels and aligning these incentives based on their
respective omni-channel goals, insurmountable results can be achieved. This alignment often leads to customer-centric
goals that are universally-applicable across all channels.
13. 13
yy Up-to-the minute view of the customer from any location of engagement
It is crystal clear that consumer expectations are rapidly shifting, and today’s consumer demands an integrated
omni-channel experience. This is not to say that every retailer needs to implement all derivatives of omni-channel
fulfillment. By actively assessing a customer’s needs and establishing a process for integrating new omni-channel
capabilities that meet these needs, retailers can begin to learn what initiatives have the greatest impact on their business.
yy Leverage ‘new’ in-memory technology to enable a seamless experience
To realize the benefits from omni-channel initiatives, retailers must integrate enterprise systems such as Order Management
(OMS), Point of Sale (POS), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) seamlessly into all channels. This integration
allows for inventory to be visible and available in all touch points, and enables the retailer to leverage key customer data
at the moment the customer is ready to make a purchase decision.
yy Single view of the customer and insight across channels, products and operations that were previously spread over
multiple siloed applications
Having a single view of the customer across all channels will help manage demand, out-of-stock and inventory levels. The
insights gained will help understand the current flow of supply chain operations and take required measures to provide
customers what they want, when they want it.
14. 14
yy Create a real-time data platform that facilitates a decision support system
A brand/retailer should create a real-time data platform that facilitates a decision support system that caters to their needs.
yy Deliver a single calculation of customer demand across all channels via high-speed predictive analytics
Social Curation is a small-scale buzzword for retail in 2014 as retailers leverage shopper social data and
insights to curate product assortments online and in-store. Analytics will also be helpful in gauging new product
introduction performance as in near-real-time, the retailer will have access to product performance data and can make
future inventory decisions based on actual shopper demand. Retailers need to stop focusing on siloed channel strategies
and start ensuring that they are meeting the needs of consumers wherever, whenever, and however they want.
yy Provide sales associates with ERP and CRM integrated mobile devices that enable higher customer service level
offerings
In-store clienteling applications supported by a customer-centric platform run on mobile devices that are fully integrated
into the company’s ERP platform. It is imperative for handheld devices to be considered a fully functional device, and
incorporated into a company’s technological strategy and architecture. This enables the tracking of individual customer
shopping preferences and purchase history, which in turn facilitates the offering of personalized recommendations by
sales associates.
15. 15
Traditional Clienteling
A customer has found a pair of
shoes on a store’s website, but
she’d like to try them on before
she buys.
Over a quarter of consumers
will buy a differnt brand when
a product is out of stock
The customer
leaves.
Black High Heel
She shows the pair of
shoes to the retail
associate.
BlackHigh Heel
The retail associate
checks the stock
room, but doesn’t
have her size.
1
2
3
4
16. A customer walks by
her favorite store. She
receives a mobile
coupon notification
about a new pair of
shoes she might like.
COUPON
Limited stocks
available.
NEW ARRIVAL
She shows the
notification to the
retail associate
in-store.
Product information
is easily accessed
via an app. The
retail assistant can
see that the shoes
are available in her
size.
The retail associate browses the
customer’s purchase history –
she is a loyal customer with a
fondness for handbags.
The system makes product
recommendations based on past
purchases and inventory onhand.
A personalized offer is generated,
offering 25% off a handbag when
purchased with the shoes.
+
25%
DISCOUNT
COUPON
49% of consumers who
see mobile ads will
make a purchase.
1
2
3
4
Social Clienteling
17. 17
Connected Retail Delivers Real Benefits
Convert Window Shoppers to Buyers
Gadgets like iBeacons that send push notifications
to Smartphone users when they are within the
proximity of the store, can help lure in window
shoppers into your store. Once their interest is captured,
they would be tempted to check your products out.
Generate Repeat Sales
The novelty of experience is sure to impress your
customers, thus exponentially increasing the customer
satisfaction factor. If customers are satisfied, they can
most definitely be equivalent to repeat customers.
Expand Customer Network
Repeat customers are a key factor to expand your
fan base. Your fan base will most likely spread the
word about your exceptional service. In this era of
connectivity, reference through networking is effective,
viral and cost-effective.
Easily Target Specific User Groups
Personalized offers are more oriented towards existing
customers. Pushing offers targeting specific groups (like
offers on sports products to attract sports enthusiasts)
through iBeacons, can help you bring in new customers.
$
18. 18
Up-sell / Cross-sell:
Technological innovations like Smart Carts (which are “tools” in clienteling solutions) help you up-sell & cross-sell to
your customers. Based on the products they already have in their carts, they can be “educated” about how they can
save up on the product by purchasing a larger quantity or even guide them on the combination of products that can
be purchased.
Encourage Loyalty
Following up a successful sale with offers based on a customer’s purchase history through mobile coupon offerings,
emails and, text messages have proven effective to encourage brand loyalty. Along with this, if customers are notified
about offers that are soon to be launched, right at the POS (billing counter, online store, etc.), you can ensure they
will come back and make future purchases at some point.
19. 19
Building a business case for clienteling begins by understanding that traffic
multiplied by conversion rate, multiplied by transaction size, equals store sales.
These levels are all positively impacted by clienteling. 5
Research indicates that
customers spend 3.5 to 4x more annually, with an average transactional size of
63% greater compared to those of “non clienteled” customers. These customers
are also 33% more likely to return as repeat customers.
Most importantly, clienteling activities deliver specific response to time and effort
invested. The same report indicated that associated clienteling efforts to reach out
to the customer delivered a 24% conversion rate within 14 days of a specific
outreach investment. Similarly, outreach regarding new product arrivals and
invitations have contributed 6% to overall traffic, whilst increasing margin on this
spend by 8% due to the sale occurring prior to product markdown offering.
The Business Value of Clienteling
Improved Customer Satisfaction
Increased Top-line Revenue
Reduced Out-of-stocks
Long-term Benefits
Increased Customer Lifetime
20. 1
Retail Touch Points
2
Forrester Research
3
Forrester Research
4
Forrester Research, Inc.
5
Retail Touch Points
To sum this up in terms of the value opportunity, we simply return to
the simple equation above regarding traffic, conversion, and average
sale. When the above impacts are combined, it is clear that a clienteled
customer delivers more to the retailer in all three metrics.
The combination of the three yields an overall margin improvement of
approximately 1% for every 5% increase in clienteled customers. For
example, assuming revenue of $1B and a net margin of 8%, a retailer could
expect to witness an approximate of 10% marginal increase for every 4%
increase in clienteled customers.
SCHEDULE A DEMO TO
SEE THIS IN ACTION
Experience an end-to-end
omni-channel retail
process covering all
customer touch points.
REQUEST NOW
