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Last September I took part to an online industry panel discussion about whether ‘customers only care about price’. This was part of the Adobe Chats ‘The Debrief’ video series hosted by Octopus Group.
Here is the link to the video and transcript below:
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Marie x
Moderator: Customer experience is a significant area of concern in retail, what’s your take on all of this?
Me: Customer experience is definitely the biggest trend we’ve seen in marketing strategies in the recent years, particularly at the moment when the retail sector needs to reinvent itself after the impact Covid had on our economy.
What we’ve seen in retail is this shift from brands focusing on customer service as the main touchpoint with their customers, to a real customer centric strategy through CX.
We know that the main impact customer experience has is in creating feelings and emotions, so the goal here is to create an emotional connection with customers. I mean, if you think about it, this is how human beings connect to each other, we share emotions through common experiences.
There is this famous quote that goes ‘people will forget what you said, they will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.' So what you want is to get to know your customers main challenges and find personalised solutions for them through the customer experience you give them.
To answer your question about price, I think if price was really the main purchase driver, luxury brands would simply do not exist. And to a certain extent, this is where the foundation of CX comes from, going beyond the simple transactional relationship with customers to tap into the emotional sphere, the elevated needs we have.
And once the brand knows their customers inside out beyond their primary needs, they can design personalised solutions that will keep them happy meaning a highly loyal customer meaning a high lifetime value customer that not only will keep coming back but will buy with a high average order value every time and will spread the word around them about what a great experience they had with your brand.
Moderator: Marie, you’ve worked at an array of retail brands over your career – how have you created customer experiences that demonstrably contribute to commercial outcomes? And do you ever have a sense that, really, it’s all about price at the end of the day?
Me: I think it’s all about price when there is no emotional attachment to the product. Now, as most of us are more and more in search of a higher sense of purpose behind how we live our lives, this naturally translates in how we shop and the brands we shop from.
The personalisation of customers journey and marketing communication is key here to be able to deliver the experience the customer is looking for and this is particularly challenging when your company is trading across international markets. Localisation should be at the center of any customer centric strategy particularly when it comes to customer experience.
What is considered as a good shopping experience is going to be very different from a country to another.
In China, you will want to invest heavily into optimising your mobile experience as well as how your brand is featured on social channels through KOL activities to inspire trust; in Australia, you will need to adapt your visual merchandising and create localised content to match the counter season; and then in France, most fashion brands will invest into UGC to provide customers with inspirational and elevated content they can relate to and get style advice from.
From a more global level, the use of Augmented Reality is super interesting when it comes to create amazing customer experiences – NYX (Niks) for example, their app allow customers to virtually test different make up products and can even connect with beauty consultants for live video chats to give advice. Imagine a fashion brand doing that, being able to try clothes with your phone would definitely help with conversion especially for new brands where customers are not sure of the fit for example…plus super useful if we go into a second lockdown soon!
Moderator: How do you create a customer experience that keeps people coming back through the doors? Is it all about price, or what other influencers are there? Marie, what do you make of this? What do brands focus on when they are creating customer experience strategies? What other factors are at play, do you think?
Me: If a brand feels the only way they can influence trade is through discounting then it’s a sign there is something missing in their marketing strategy and how they justify their full price to customers.
What you want is to create a strong and unique vision of what the brand is and that starts with identifying your values. And really that means what do you stand for, what is important for you, how do you want to contribute in our society, what you are ready to fight for.
It’s not something you can make up just because a new trend has emerged such as sustainability, it needs to be part of your true DNA from the start.
At Boden the values of friendship, kindness, style and Joy are translated throughout our website, our catalogues, our customer service, our imagery, our work with charities and even the way of working with each other internally.
So once you have identified your own values and what your brand stands for, you want to match that with your customers’ needs and translate it through your customer experience and proposition. You want to get real time insights about what your customers want and be able to react quickly if you want to influence sales. At Boden, beyond traditional focus groups or usability tests we also use WhatsApp groups with our customers from different countries, that gives us a real time and actionable feedback on our products.
Moderator: And that leads to perhaps the most important question of all: how do we get the balance right? With time and budgets in short supply, how do we know for sure where best to invest our efforts?
Me: It all depends how mature your business is and what success looks like to you.
If you’re a newly launched businesses, you will want to invest into high ROI channels and follow your P&L closely but you should still have your values and customer insights at the heart of your marketing mix and be willing to deliver a unique customer experience if you want to stand out from the competition.
The more established businesses looking for ways to reinvent themselves will have to look beyond BAU strategies, discounts or social media and focus their efforts on their customer experience, especially investing into tech such as Augmented Reality or personalisation tools and collaborating with localisation companies to give the best level of services to their customers.
So to sum up: Define what success looks like, how that matches your values, what your customers needs are à you will know what feels right in terms of marketing investments.
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