For the rich and famous, shopping has always been a different experience compared to what the rest of us are used to.
Heading to the most exclusive boutiques and department stores, you can expect to be welcomed and accompanied by a ‘personal assistant’ who is charged with catering to all your needs, sharing information about products and making recommendations. The aim is to make the whole experience as comfortable and hassle-free as possible.
It’s known as clienteling – the art of putting the needs and interests of the individual customer front and centre of the retail experience. Traditionally, it’s been a concept found only at the higher echelons of society, a VIP experience. And that’s because, to get clienteling right, you need in-depth understanding of the customer in question.
In many cases, wealthy patrons would get the same assistant every time they visited a particular retail establishment, forming long-term relationships which helped the personal assistant cater to their every whim.
No mass-market business could hope to assign a personal assistant to every customer. Which is why clienteling has remained the preserve of the most exclusive establishments.
But thanks to the digitisation of retail, things are changing. With so much customer data collected these days – and not just on the VIPs, but on every customer – businesses have a wealth of information available which allows them to personalize every shopping journey.
The ready availability of data is making it possible to remodel customer experiences around a clienteling mindset – highly personalized, attentive, responsive, putting the needs of every customer first.
So how do you get started? Here are three things every retail business needs to do to start treating customers more like long-term clients.
Connect data end-to-end across your business
It’s true that most customer data continues to be collected online. Which also makes it easier to get started with clienteling online. With digital purchase histories, tracking of browsing habits, people signing up for subscriptions and much more all generating useful data about your online customers, it’s pretty easy to start making personalized recommendations and send targeted promotions etc. Every online business is likely already doing these things to one extent or another.
The key for physical retailers is how to shift these benefits in-store, too. Data isn’t so easy to collect in-store without consensual opt-in from customers (more on that below). But what you can do is integrate your CRM and any other system that holds data on your customers and make it available through your POS. That then becomes a resource for in-store clerks to use to make personalized recommendations etc. Or, on self-service kiosks, for customers to be presented with personalized purchase pathways and options tailored to their interests and preferences. Much like the very best examples of online personalization already offer.
Identify your customers
After years of being able to use personal data with very little regulation, businesses these days of course have to be wary of falling foul of privacy laws like the CCPA and CPRA (and, in Europe, the GDPR). A particularly sensitive issue is the use of identifying data without an individual’s express permission.
Clienteling depends on knowing who your customers are. You can’t make a recommendation based on Mrs Brown’s past purchase history if you don’t know it’s Mrs Brown standing before you. For access to that knowledge, you need clear customer buy-in and consent.
The majority of consumers are happy to trade access to their personal data in exchange for clear benefits to them. It’s not difficult to make a case for clienteling leading to better levels of service, better offers, more choice, perhaps ‘VIP’ style benefits etc. The question is how to go about getting permission.
Online, this is generally managed through things like sign-up forms and other forms of ‘lead capture’, basically asking customers for permission to use their contact details to send them marketing materials. This approach can be extended in-store using kiosks. Existing loyalty schemes can also be adapted to focus more on elevated levels of service (i.e. clienteling rather than just accruing points and rewards.
In the future, we might expect the growth in branded mobile apps to play a role in customer identification. As soon as someone with the company’s app downloaded on their cell phone walks into the store, a push notification could signal to staff (or the wider POS systems) who they are, making their data available. Just as long as people have opted in to the app being used that way, of course.
Extend the conversation
Finally, we mentioned at the start of this piece that clienteling in its traditional form was all about forging long-term relationships with customers. That remains the case today. And one of the first things any retail business can do is think carefully about how to make communications with customers as effective as possible.
For store owners, a key area to think about is how to leverage digital communications to drive more footfall to stores. Digital marketing is already pretty good at driving traffic to websites and social channels etc. But stores are still able to offer types of experience – try before you buy, instant fulfilment, product launches, celebrity appearances and other events – that can’t be easily replicated online. This kind of value-add from your store sits squarely within the ‘exclusive’ ethos of clienteling. These are things worth communicating clearly and regularly with customers to drum up excitement in visiting stores.
There’s also a lot to be said for handling conversations with customers from stores, rather than from some impersonal, unknown comms team somewhere. Messages from people the customer recognizes, about opportunities in a store they regularly visit – that’s a strong basis for building strong, personal relationships.
There are various ways to go about this. Email marketing has long been a central tool for digital marketers. But individual stores might be better served setting up social accounts local customers can follow, or even WhatsApp groups for plugging in-store events, special promotions etc.
Yet another idea is to devolve responsibility for managing live chat tools on a company’s website to sales assistants in local stores. That would facilitate conversations along the lines of a customer asking, can you check that X product is in stock before I head to the mall? Or has my order arrived for click and collect? In a further blurring of the lines between on and offline, this could extend into clerks in store providing assistance that leads to an online sale.
Ultimately, all of this is about finding ways to smooth the path to making purchases for customers, and providing a level of attention and quality service that makes them feel valued and eager to buy from you again and again. In that sense, clienteling perhaps represents the next phase in the evolution of digitised retail, where we stop viewing digital and physical retail as separate entities – and start looking at how digital technology can benefit the customer across all channels.