Did you know that 63% of retailers are unable to identify their customers prior to checkout? 20% can’t identify until after check out, or not at all (maybe they don’t care once they have their money). Yet, 87% of customers are interested in a personalised and consistent shopping experience.
There is a gap between customer expectations and the reality of the retail experience. To bridge this gap, brands must empower their in-store staff with customer information that helps them understand the customer's needs, wants and interests.
This is where clienteling comes in.
Put simply, if a client is a customer, then clienteling is the act of selling to the customer in person.
A clienteling platform provides your staff with the information about the customer they’re serving in real time to make selling a more personalised experience. It also allows the staff member to save information about the customer and interaction to help them pick up where they left off next time.
So what’s the difference between clienteling and good old-fashioned customer service? While both have similar goals, customer service is based mainly on face-value information. Clienteling goes a step further. It considers the customer’s profile—including historical and behavioural information gleaned from product lists—to provide an enhanced 1:1 customer experience.
Clienteling, therefore, enhances customer service. By viewing the customer’s profile and history, your store staff can assist them armed with their personal details, size information, previous purchases, wishlist and preferences to provide them with product advice based on their unique style, likes and dislikes.
They can also assist them with a complete history of customer service issues, feedback, interactions, rewards, benefits, and status to provide a highly personalised and engaging in-store experience.
Think of clienteling in retail as your little black book. It’s an actively updated resource that helps deliver better shopping experiences for your customers.
Brands usually capture a lot of customer data and information. However, most often, this data is weaponised solely through a marketing technology stack to create more personalised marketing experiences for the customers. This information is rarely made available to the staff serving customers in real-time.
Sometimes staff are able to capture information, but it’s done in an ad hoc way that is only available to that staff member or store - a literal little black book that does not scale and creates many data privacy risks.
On the other hand, clienteling interfaces make this customer information available in real time to a staff member serving a customer. This access to data such as the customer’s name, preferences, purchase history, and more empowers the staff member to create a more personalised 1:1 retail experience for the customer.
Clienteling takes the in-store retail experience to the next level—for the customer and your staff members. 85% to 95% of all in-store transactions should be associated with a known customer profile, which is why clienteling is necessary.
Armed with clienteling data, your staff now have the ability to service customers in a more personalised way. At the very least, they can treat existing customers as a known person by greeting them by name. They can also capture in-store interactions and purchasing behaviour, record customer service feedback on the back of store visits by known customers, and use them as valuable business metrics.
Traditionally, staff are trained on how to sell a brand. However, it’s important to remember that staff members are also agents of the customer. They empower your customers to make better, more informed purchases in-store. Clienteling gives your staff members the agency to represent the customer—not just the brand.
For example, in-store staff can record what they tried on, liked and didn’t like for future reference. Further, customer service enquiries can be submitted directly to the customer’s account on their behalf by store staff.
In clienteling, instead of weaponising the customer data through martech, you empower your staff to be better informed and get right into interacting with the customer.
A personalised shopping experience creates more loyal customers and leads to more (and repeat) sales as a result of this customer loyalty. A clienteling solution that creates a unified commerce experience can also bridge gaps between digital and physical touchpoints.
Many brands are already doing clienteling, albeit not very well. In the old days of luxury retail, clienteling often took the form of a black book filled with the highest value of clients’ names, addresses, phone numbers and preferences.
While practical, brands often maintain important customer data like this in physical notebooks or shared spreadsheets—which are prone to privacy risks. Your spreadsheet of personally identifiable customer data could easily be emailed to the wrong person, or your physical notebook could be accessed by the wrong person. This is a data breach waiting to happen!
Some brands take a slightly more modern approach. They save their data to the native POS management screens. However, this presents problems of its own as it generally has poor data quality validation, usually only acts as a database, and doesn’t provide much insight into your customers.
Lastly, some brands attempt to gather their data from the marketing database. They don’t actively collect customer data from transactions or behaviour, thus letting the customer down and creating a poor experience - unless that experience only involves receiving more emails.
Now that you know what NOT to do, let’s look at how to do clienteling right—without jeopardising your customer’s privacy. The right clienteling technology partner can help you create superior, seamless retail experiences for your customers and doesn’t create yet another silo of customer data that's not correctly integrated with your broader CX ecosystem.
At Omneo, we understand that the true success of your customer experience isn't about how many customers are in your database but rather how much they value their profile with the brand and how you work to engage, inspire, connect, reward, and retain them.
Here’s how Omneo Clienteling can help you empower your staff and create better retail experiences with your customers.
As Omneo is already integrated into your retail technology stack, our Clienteling feature instantly updates customer information in all connected systems. Omneo ensures that transactions are attached to the Golden Record of customer profiles in real or near time.
Clienteling isn’t a one-size-fits-all experience. Omneo Clienteling can contextualise customer profiles depending on where and how they are used. For example, your corporate customer service team will experience clienteling differently from your in-store staff accessing customer profiles at the point of sale.
While there are many views for Clienteling, the default view is customer-friendly. Your customers can easily view and access their information. Your staff may have access to more details “under the hood,” but generally, we make sure the interface is always easy to use for customers. While personalisation is always the goal, Clienteling never delves into “creepy” territory and continues to respect your customers' privacy expectations.
Even when a customer doesn’t purchase anything or transact with the brand, it can act as an opportunity to gather further information about their preferences. Brands can make use of different product lists to improve the customer journey. These lists help create rich, insight-filled customer profiles that empower brands to provide highly personalised and engaging shopping experiences for their customers—across all channels.
Omneo is the only CX platform with a dedicated Clienteling interface specifically designed to be viewed on customers' phones while they are in your store. It can be easily accessed using email ‘magic links’ instead of passwords by scanning QR codes or a simple my.yourbrand.com web address.
Omneo Clienteling can help your brand create seamless and enjoyable customer experiences. Contact us today to learn more.
