Now that you know what clienteling is and why it’s important, let’s take a look at how to do clienteling best.
The most significant barrier to effective clienteling is often the lack of quality data. As discussed in the previous article, many brands are still using old-fashioned data collection and storage methods such as a notebook or a spreadsheet. These systems generally act as a customer data repository and don’t provide much insight into customer behaviour - and not to mention pose a data privacy risk.
There is often little to no formal process for in-store data collection. While some brands may lack the tools for this, others simply skip it as its importance isn’t understood. Some brands do collect data, but it’s usually for marketing or reporting purposes and not for improving the customer experience, so it often isn’t meaningful to in-store retail teams.
For clienteling to be successful, there needs to be an emphasis on collecting quality and meaningful data that will help the customer shop. A CX platform like Omneo can help simplify the process with a clienteling interface. Your teams can capture critical customer data in-store and feed it into a customer profile. The customer profile is built out with data from various sources to create a comprehensive view of the customer that gives you better insights into their preferences and how to engage them.
Data is a crucial piece of the clienteling puzzle, but how can you do clienteling to truly ensure the best, most personalised retail experience for your customers? Here are five tips:
You probably don’t need us to tell you that great clienteling starts in-store. Your customer’s interactions with in-store retail associates are vital to their shopping experience. Friendly, helpful service from your team can lead to a better, more satisfying customer experience.
However, exceptional service doesn’t just come from relying on your staff’s memory of a particular customer’s preferences. It comes from equipping your team with the right training and tools to empower them to become better at their jobs, which leads to providing better in-store experiences.
Clienteling software can empower your sales associates with customer information and insights that paint a complete picture of the customer’s wants and needs. You must also ensure your sales associates fully understand the features of the software, how to successfully use it and most importantly, why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Further, by incorporating product lists, this customer data can come to life by profiling past purchases and predicting potential future purchases. This data can help your associates better serve your customers and keep them coming back.
Your retail team will want to identify a customer at the start of their visit, not just when they have their credit card out, in order to help them pick up where they left off with the brand - on any channel - and potentially save important new information and preferences before, during and after the transaction event.
Data collection and analysis are essential, not just for a better in-store experience but, in fact, for the entire customer journey. Clienteling is all about creating great, personalised shopping experiences. This necessitates creating and sending relevant offers to customers instead of subjecting them to generic email blasts that don’t consider their personal preferences.
For example, a customer in Melbourne doesn’t need to be blasted with offers advertising sales at Sydney stores. It’s irrelevant to them.
Incorporating clienteling best practices means using your customer insights only to send out highly relevant and targeted marketing messaging to your customers. Location-specific offers can be useful. Additionally, use past and predictive data to personalise messaging for online offers as well.
Connecting customers to particular stores or clusters makes relevant communications simple and also allows for better value attribution to those stores.
Your existing customers are usually your most loyal customers. Yet, many brands continue to focus more on customer acquisition over retention. The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the chance of selling to a new prospect is only 5% to 20%.
“Loyal customers are 5x as likely to repurchase, 5x as likely to forgive, 4x as likely to refer, and 7x as likely to try a new offering,” according to Microsoft.
It, therefore, makes sense that brands must invest time and effort into their customer retention efforts. This often requires implementing some simple solutions. For example, by incorporating loyalty programs into the clienteling interface, you can collect more data about your customers and use them to create better experiences and incentives for customers who have already purchased from your business.
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again — unified commerce is the retail industry standard. Brands not doing it are falling behind. “67% of customers use several of the brand’s channels to complete one transaction, in a “start the sale anywhere, finish the sale anywhere” ethos,” a Salesforce report revealed.
A unified customer experience across all brand channels is an important best practice to follow for effective clienteling. It improves your operational efficiency but, more importantly, the customer experience—whether in-store, online or even within an app. A unified commerce platform designed to catch all the data influx from every one of your customer touchpoints is a leg up for enhanced customer satisfaction.
By adding store visit information into lists and staff-curated personal recommendations, you can generate an ‘abandoned cart for stores’ workflow that improves the chances of each store visit converting - even if it's not in the store.
Use the information you get from your customer data platform to build a rich, fully realised profile for every one of your customers. Then use these profiles as a jump-off point for genuine customer relationship management.
While much of the focus in this article has been about the store associates' role in clienteling experiences, don’t forget that the customer has a device (their phone) and a vested interest in the data you have saved about them.
Your clienteling solution should also offer a customer view via an easy-to-use app or website that can be activated and accessed by the customer and is optimised for the in-store experience. Your existing ‘my account’ page on your ecommerce page won’t cut it.
To see a great example of these in action, visit my.mjbale.com or my.review-australia.com.
Finally, great clienteling is impossible without the right tech by your side. This doesn’t just mean incorporating great POS software. It means your entire retail stack! A little black book or a spreadsheet isn’t going to cut it in the modern retail world.
Your brand needs a solution that enables better customer shopping experiences. A retail stack that comes with a robust clienteling interface is crucial. Train your staff on how to use the software for maximum business benefits. Equip associates on how to create or add to customer profiles, create lists, add personal notes, and send prompts to customers about sales.
As you already know, the more data you collect, the better you get to know your customers. And the better you know them, the better experience you can provide for them.
The best clienteling solution is one that makes providing better customer experiences a smooth, seamless experience. Needless to say, your clienteling interface must have the ability to create and update customer profiles. It should also be easily configurable to suit your particular needs.
The clienteling interface must easily integrate with your POS system to ensure one central system for sales staff. Plus, it should also incorporate this profile information into your e-commerce platform, so the customer information is universally available—no matter where it was captured.
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. Our Clienteling interface empowers you to do precisely this. Contact us today to learn more.
