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A customer experience audit of women's retail

Nick Godfrey, executive vice president and co-founder, Customer Portfolios, explains how an audit of the customer experience is not only necessary but critical if a retailer wants to truly commit to creating a better customer experience.

Photo by istock.com

September 17, 2019

By Nick Godfrey, executive vice president and co-founder, Customer Portfolios

The objective of CRM is to create a great customer experience that is unbroken, integrated, effective and strategically thought out. By turning the tables and looking at the experience through eyes of the customer, we can generate an idea of how any brand is doing with the core components of CRM. By looking at a number of like brands within a vertical and measuring the results, we have the means to quantitatively compare their marketing efforts.  

Recently, we conducted a five-week customer experience audit of 10 women's retail brands. The goal is to audit the qualitative experience with a quantitative measurement, going beyond "soft and fluffy" qualities to get to the heart of what makes an ideal customer experience for a specific vertical.

A good experience from a business perspective is different than a good experience from a customer perspective. As a consumer, you know what a good experience is. But what are the things that took place that made that experience happen the way it did? During this audit, we're taking a deeper look into the experience, to see what specifically works, and what doesn't.  

We signed up and entered customer relationships with these brands, evaluating our interactions on nine criteria:

•    Web site
1.    Email sign-up.
2.    Web personalization.
3.    Digital ads.
•    Email
4.    Email volume.
5.    Email campaigns.
•    Off Site
6.    Retargeting/abandoned cart.
7.    Purchase process.
8.    Returning purchase to store.
•    Tying it all together
9.    All the little things that add up.
i.    Account sign-up.
ii.    Consistent messaging.
iii.    Loyalty.
iv.    Other touch points.

Findings:
•    Consistent message rules.
a.    Brands scored the highest in having consistent messaging across platforms, and not asking for an email address every time we logged into the website.
•    Room to improve personalization
a.    With all the focus on digital ads, the audited brands were just average — ranking an average of two out of a possible five.
b.    Web personalization is a weak point for all brands, with either very little or no discernable personalization on the website.
•    Cross channel shopping is easy, but without ‘knowing' the customer
a.    Returning items to store is a fairly simple process, but only one brand connected the return to the customer loyalty account.
•    Not truly omnichannel
a.    Only one brand offered a mobile application and used DM to engage the customer
•    Few were "just right" (which Goldilocks likes!)
a.    Many brands fell outside of the optimal email volume range, sending customers too few or too many emails over a 30-day period.

Observations:
 
•    Email experience
Everyone is familiar with email and how it works. What we are looking at is how it should work better. When I sign up for a brand's email, I'd like to know what to expect before I opt-in (rather than after). And once I sign up, I wish to receive an appropriate level of communications; not too much or not too little. I don't know of any brand that I wish to hear from daily, or multi-times daily. For example, a woman's apparel brand I opted in for sent me 20 emails in a 30-day month. Unless there is a very good customer reason, this is too much.  A great brand, yet poor email experience.

•    Web site experience
When on a brand's web site, browsing, poking around and thinking about shopping, I want to be assisted, not hindered. While there is always room for improvement and not all customers wish to be engaged the same way, there are certain customer experiences I believe everyone can agree on as less than optimal. Some examples, from convenient to annoying: when I return to a brand's web site where I'd been looking at men's products, don't populate my homepage experience with women's sale products. Or, when I'm trying to check out, help me by using my account information and pre-populate field's info that I know you know, like my name. Then, at the top of the list of annoying, stop with the email pop-ups when I've clicked through from an email; this is basic.

•    Off-site experience
I want to ask brands that have my information (otherwise known as Data) to please use it properly. By way of examples, if I have placed an item in the shopping cart, pause to consider before chasing me around the web with messages to buy -- especially if I have gone into the brand's store and purchased the same item. Or, if I have made a purchase online, from a brand's web site, only to find that it did not fit properly, please allow me to easily go into the physical store and make a return. These are scenarios that happen with many brands all too often.

•    Tying it all together
Everyone has received some form of brand contradiction or message confusion while shopping. I find it happens too often. As an example, the ‘special' I receive in an email is nowhere to be found on the brand's web site and is very different from the current offer being broadcasted in the store. Or, as another example of the experience being broken, a brand has an insider loyalty program for which the offer and benefits are trumped by the broadcasted offer being delivered to non-loyalty members.

Conclusion

Given the audit's results and the insight provided, there is an opportunity to improve the (broken) customer experience. Because the audit is relatively short, we can't see everything about the company. But we advocate taking these findings and looking at your customer database holistically. Are your customers active, inactive or lapsed? Loyal, repeat or one-time buyers? Are they new, reactivated or retained? All these things will come together when you look at the full portfolio, and that's how you truly commit to creating a better customer experience.