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Leveraging technology for retail clienteling

AG Jeans case study insights on how digital clienteling helped them drive business

Premium retailers fall somewhere between mass market and luxury and so, they face unique challenges when it comes to clienteling. With a high volume of high-end customers who expect personalized service, these retailers need to be able to provide a seamless and tailored experience that makes every customer feel like they are getting individualized attention even at scale. 

Technology can help premium retailers meet their customer’s demands and provide personalized experiences by automating processes, gathering data, and enhancing the in-store experience, which ultimately drives sales and customer loyalty. 

In this blog, we will explore these three ways that technology helps premium retailers with clienteling, drawing upon insights from our recent case study of AG Jeans.

Streamline the clienteling process

One of the biggest challenges that premium retailers face with clienteling is the sheer volume of data that needs to be tracked and analyzed. They have a wealth of information on their customers, including their purchase history, preferences, and interests. However, manually managing and analyzing all of this data can be a herculean task.

Digital clienteling has completely changed the game for retailers of all sizes looking to organize and manage their customer data. By implementing digital client books, retailers can provide their associates with a repeatable way to keep track of customer information and manage customer follow ups and outreach. 

For AG Jeans, having a centralized digital platform that offers 360-degree customer profiles, containing everything from purchase history to personal preferences, enables their stylists to seamlessly provide highly personalized service that meets each customer’s unique needs. As a result, AG Jeans has seen amazing conversions from customer outreach communications that is nearly four times what they saw before.

3.6x
increase in conversion on outreach with Tulip Clienteling

Drive sales across channels

Combining clienteling practices with technology also empowers retail associates to make sales across channels in a more efficient and attributable way than ever before. With roughly 75% of consumers participating in omnichannel shopping, retailers need to equip their associates to play a proactive role in this multi-channel journey. That means being able to make attributable sales outside the four walls of the store.

In order for omnichannel selling to be effective, associates need to be able to meet their customers where they are. Trying to drive sales via email won’t work for an audience of customers who prefer social media or texting, and visa-versa. But, again, manually tracking which customers prefer which method of communication, especially with a largely diverse customer base, requires excessive legwork to accomplish.

For AG Jeans, this meant empowering their stylists to communicate with customers through a variety of mediums such as email, SMS, phone, and social messaging. Quick templates helped the stylists to send personalized communications in a scalable and efficient manner. Additionally, stylists could sell customers the full AG Jeans product line using its digital lookbook and endless aisle feature. This approach allows customers to make purchases directly through the ecommerce site, with the sale automatically attributed to the stylist who sent it.

5x
increase in customer outreach volume with Tulip Clienteling

Creating a quick and easy system for AG Jeans stylists to conduct large-scale, personal customer outreach has helped them complete five times as much outreach as they were doing previously, which has helped them drive revenue and customer loyalty.

Grow the business strategically

Clienteling technology provides retailers with on-demand visibility to in-depth reports, which help drive the business strategically. In the past, operational reporting used to require extensive effort from managers to review mountains of manual notes and client books scattered across numerous personal devices. Which, for many retailers like AG Jeans, resulted in reporting only being done monthly, quarterly, or even annually. 

As AG Jeans’ Director of Retail, James Bishop, puts it, “When we talk about having insight to data, it’s not enough to have those metrics at annual or even quarterly reviews, it needs to be in real time”. Store managers need to have easy-to-understand insights available at their fingertips. 

In the case of AG Jeans, this meant deploying a system that automatically records and organizes customer data and outreach metrics for each associate, enabling managers to coach their teams and drive performance. For executive leadership, the automated outcome reporting provides real-time sales and store performance data, allowing for agile decision-making. 

These reporting capabilities enable AG Jeans leadership to make data-driven decisions that positively impact the business, such as driving revenue by increasing AOV by nearly 20%.

17%
increase in AOV with Tulip Clienteling

Bringing it all together

Premium retailers face unique challenges when it comes to clienteling, but technology can help overcome these challenges in a number of ways. By streamlining the clienteling process, driving sales across channels, and having on-demand access to data that will help strategically grow the business, technology can help premium retailers provide a personalized and tailored experience that meets the high expectations of their high-end clientele. 

The case of AG Jeans serves as an excellent example of how technology can be leveraged to improve the clienteling experience, and provides valuable insights for retailers of all sizes looking to enhance their own clienteling efforts.

Download the full case study now.

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