Clienteling: What It Really Is.
2 Is there an App for that? In the world of retail technology, the term Clienteling has achieved buzzword status. As a result of this newfound popularity, the meaning of the word has become blurred and obscured in a fog of hype. Let s expose some of these myths so we can define what it really is. Once we define the word, we can separate a true Clienteling solution from the imposters. Before we attempt to define what Clienteling is, we need to explain what it is not. The trend toward smartphones and tablets coupled with a low barrier to entry for mobile app development has spawned a number of new products from both start-up companies and established vendors. Although these products are marketed as Clienteling solutions, they ultimately fall short because their focus is limited to one of the following areas: Pretty Pictures Clienteling is not just an ipad app supplying product information alongside product images. Mobile user interfaces offer great usability, and there is definitely a need for deploying solutions to ipads or other mobile devices. The key to evaluating these solutions is determining whether their beauty is more than skin deep. Simply displaying product information and images without linking them to customer, inventory, or other operational data prevents you from measuring your success and delighting your customers. Order Taking Clienteling is not just a mobile POS or line busting solution to create orders on behalf of a customer. As with the example above, this can be a much needed capability that is deployed as part of a Clienteling solution, but it is only one facet. Capturing orders without access to key information about the customer limits your opportunity to meet and exceed the high expectations of today s shoppers. Missing a chance to build loyalty limits the value of these save the sale solutions. Big Data Clienteling is not just a CRM database. Many vendors talk about providing a 360 view of the customer, but this is nearly impossible to achieve unless your CRM is tightly integrated with an all-channel commerce platform. Today s consumer expects you to know all about their interactions with your brand, but simply knowing is not enough. To receive value for your investment in Clienteling technology, this knowledge must be actionable by your store associates in the form of order visibility, cross-sell opportunities, and customer history. These are but a few examples of apps being passed off as Clienteling. Without a standard definition for the term, it s easy for software providers to label their solutions as Clienteling despite their limited and incomplete capabilities. If you re investing in a Clienteling system, you deserve more for your money.
3 Clienteling Defined Now that we ve seen what Clienteling is not, let s define what it is. We ll look at it from a business value perspective, meaning that to truly qualify as Clienteling, the solution must solve pertinent business issues while providing value - a return on your investment. cli en tel ing [klî-ən-tel-ing] noun 1. A system to manage customers engagement business processes for bringing customers into your store, providing an exceptional in-store shopping experience and keeping your customers coming back for more. example: Sales increased after we began using clienteling to improve the customer experience in our stores. The definition of Clienteling: A system to manage customer engagement business processes for bringing customers into your stores, providing an exceptional in-store shopping experience, and keeping your customers coming back for more. This business process is circular in nature and delivers real business value by optimizing customer relationships to build loyalty, increase customer spend, grow store revenue, and reinforce selling best practices for sales associates. In addition to managing the process, a true Clienteling solution allows you to monitor and measure effectiveness for continuous improvement. Elements of a Clienteling business process: Targeted and relevant customer engagement and outreach Empowering sales associates to provide an exceptional in-store customer experience Relevant and timely follow-up with the customer Integrated monitoring and measurement
4 Why is each of these essential to a Clienteling solution? Let s take a look at the details behind each one: Targeted and relevant customer engagement and outreach. Clienteling s first goal is to reach out and engage customers in a personalized and relevant manner to drive traffic into the store. This is one of the most commonly absent capabilities in solutions labeled Clienteling. Targeted and relevant customer outreach means identifying key information about a given customer and taking appropriate action. A simple example of this might be triggered by the introduction of a new line of products in the retailer s stores. Knowing that certain customers have a preference for a specific brand or have made a purchase from that brand in the past, it would be a good practice to notify them of the new product introduction. Customer contact could be initiated in one or more forms. If for instance your customers are segmented into tiers based on Recency-Frequency-Monetary (RFM) values, you might choose to simply send an email for those classified as mid-tier customers. For your most valuable top-tier customers, targeted outreach might involve creating a to-do for an assigned sales associate to make a personal phone call to the customer. A Clienteling solution facilitates targeted outreach at both corporate and store levels. Corporate level automation helps reinforce best customer engagement practices throughout all stores and to all sales associates. Store level outreach may be driven by individual store managers and/or sales associates. It is important to note that these targeted outreach methods are monitored and measured to track effectiveness. Whether introducing new products, holding a special store event, or simply recognizing your best customers for their patronage, the use of relevant data to trigger targeted outreach enables you to engage customers and increase store traffic by getting them into your stores.
5 Empowering sales associates to provide an exceptional in-store customer experience. Once your customers are in the store, Clienteling empowers the sales associates with better information about their products and customers. Clienteling delivers the power of ecommerce to store associates, including deep product content, cross-selling suggestions, and enterprise inventory visibility across distribution centers and stores for direct home delivery. To enhance customer engagement, Clienteling provides a 360 view of the customer across all selling channels including a virtual closet of past purchases, as well as customer style and brand preferences. This in turn provides save-the-sale and endless aisle order capture capabilities along with cross-channel order fulfillment to support business initiatives such as buy online, pickup from store and buy online, ship from store. Additionally, elements such as communication of special events, sales, policies, appointment scheduling and active to-do s for customer engagement are critical in-store activities managed by a Clienteling solution. These in-store processes can be deployed through multiple devices, whether a POS terminal, a PC/laptop or mobile device such as an ipad or ipod Touch. Relevant and timely follow-up with the customer. What happens after your customer leaves the store? This part of the process is all about engaging the customer in the appropriate way, whether through automated email or automated tasking of a sales associate for a more personalized follow-up based on the customer s contact preferences. For example, let s say a customer has purchased a suit that requires alterations. When the suit is ready, the sales associate would have a scheduled to-do to call the customer for a fitting appointment. An appointment would be booked and the customer would then return for the fitting. After the customer leaves with the newly purchased suit, another relevant follow-up would be to wait x number of weeks to contact the customer to check on their satisfaction with the purchase. After y weeks, another follow-up task might be scheduled to promote suggested cross-sell items to go along with the suit. These customer engagement tasks are part of a multistep program automating some of the best practices of your top performers so other sales associates can learn and benefit from these techniques. Integrated monitoring and measurement. Clienteling systems include the ability to track and measure processes, providing a sound basis for adjustments to increase effectiveness. Store 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. Additionally, they can monitor and measure their sales bookings performance at month and year-to-date level. Management can view these same metrics for sales bookings and task compliance at an aggregated level while also having the ability to drill down into each store associate s statistics to monitor individual performance. Finally, head office executives can view the same indicators at a regional level to monitor and measure performance and compliance across multiple stores. Closing the loop, the Clienteling cycle begins again as a continuous business process. Targeted customer engagement and outreach brings the customer into the store. Empowering sales associates with actionable information about their products and customers drives sales and enables exceptional in-store customer experiences. Relevant and timely follow-up brings customers back for more. Throughout the entire cycle, integrated monitoring and measurement enables continuous improvement.
6 Clienteling Business Value The business value with this Clienteling process is rich in ROI (Return on Investment). By automating best practices for customer engagement across the organization, companies can help maximize sales associate productivity. Clienteling takes what the best sales people do naturally and standardizes and monitors this across the organization to all stores and sales associates. This allows your best sales associates to drive even more revenue, help your average sales associates become top sales performers and help your struggling sales associates learn the best practices to become a stronger sales associate. With targeted customer engagement and outreach, a Clienteling solution increases customer traffic into the stores, thereby increasing same store sales. By empowering sales associates to provide an exceptional in-store customer experience, shopping cart sizes are increased, also increasing same store sales. With relevant customer follow-up, a Clienteling solution will improve customer satisfaction and build brand loyalty. All of these factors ultimately drive an increase in customer lifetime value for the retailer. About RedPrairie For more than 35 years, RedPrairie s best-of-breed supply chain, workforce, and all-channel retail solutions have put commerce in motion for the world s leading companies. Installed in over 60,000 customer sites across more than 50 countries, RedPrairie solutions adapt to help ensure visibility and collaboration between manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and consumers. RedPrairie is prepared to meet its customers current and future demands with multiple delivery options, flexible architecture, and 24/7 technical and customer support. For a world in motion, RedPrairie is commerce in motion. To learn more about how RedPrairie solutions can optimize your inventory, improve employee productivity, or increase sales, visit RedPrairie.com or email info@redprairie.com. 1.877.733.7724 info@redprairie.com RedPrairie.com RedPrairie Corporation has made every effort to ensure the accuracy of the information included in this document. This document is subject to change without notice. The information contained in this document may not reflect the final design in some instances. Copyright 2012 RedPrairie Corporation. All rights reserved. This publication contains proprietary information of RedPrairie Corporation. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of RedPrairie Corporation. RedPrairie and the RedPrairie logo are registered trademarks of RedPrairie Corporation. Commerce in Motion is a trademark of RedPrairie Corporation. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective holders.