What is Clienteling? A Guide for Retail Brands
Posted by Julia Morrissey on Jan 25, 2024
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The customer is the center of attention in omnichannel retail. It’s why clienteling, the customer-centric service approach, is a top priority for retailers that want to create a seamless brand experience across channels.
Clienteling may seem like a sexy solution for luxury brands. But really, white-gloved service is applicable to all brands. This is a new age for retail and every retailer has the opportunity to create a customer relationship that is truly differentiated.
Table of Contents:
Clienteling is a modern customer service technique that allows brands to build long-lasting relationships with customers, offer personalized and one-to-one shopping experiences, find cross-selling and upselling opportunities, and empower employees with actionable information. Essentially, it’s a delicate dance between commerce, content, and communication.
While customer service is a broader term that focuses on addressing customer inquiries and issues, clienteling is a more strategic and personalized approach that aims to build and maintain long-term relationships by understanding and meeting individual customer needs. Clienteling often involves using customer data and technology to enhance the shopping experience and provide targeted, personalized services.
In the current retail environment, clienteling is executed by using a combination of genuine human interaction and technology. Often it’s a component of or integrated with a point of sale (POS) system that’s available on a mobile device – removing the random nature of selling and making it easy for associates to support shoppers anywhere on the store floor.
Everything clienteling encompasses is what customers expect. It also guides their decision-making. According to the consulting firm BRP, three-fourths of shoppers say personalized service is a significant factor in helping them decide where to shop. With clienteling, you can be proactive with the customer versus reactive – validating your shopper’s choice to spend with you over your competitors.
Here’s an example of clienteling in action:
Imagine a customer who frequently visits a cosmetics store. Upon entry, a store associate would access the customer’s profile, which includes information about their preferred brands, past purchases, and any specific skin concerns mentioned during previous visits.
Additionally, the associate is aware that the customer has an upcoming special event, such as a wedding, based on the information shared during previous interactions. Armed with this knowledge, the sales team can provide personalized recommendations for skincare products tailored to address the customer’s specific concerns. Clienteling deeply enhances the customer experience, allowing for a proactive and personalized approach.
Clienteling not only benefits the shopper but also makes the store associate’s job easier. With clienteling your brand can recreate the magic of early retail and drive topline revenue.
By understanding individual customer preferences, purchase history, and needs, retailers can engage customers on a more personal level.
Retailers can use clienteling tools to maintain consistent and targeted communication with customers. This may include personalized emails, SMS messages, or app notifications, keeping customers informed about relevant products, promotions, and events.
When retailers consistently provide personalized and attentive service, customers are more likely to remain loyal to the brand, resulting in repeat business and increased customer lifetime value.
Personalized recommendations, targeted promotions based on customer data, and increased customer lifetime value, can lead to higher conversion rates. When customers feel that a retailer understands and caters to their preferences, they are more likely to make additional purchases.
Retailers can use clienteling data to anticipate customer demand and preferences, allowing for more accurate inventory forecasting. This helps in stocking the right products at the right time, minimizing overstock and stockouts.
By analyzing customer data, retailers can identify opportunities for cross-selling and upselling. Recommending complementary products or higher-value items based on a customer’s preferences can increase the average transaction value.
When clienteling involves the use of technology, such as a POS mobile device, to provide real-time access to customer information, sales associates can use this information to offer personalized assistance, making the in-store experience more engaging for customers.
Clienteling allows retailers to adapt to changing market trends and customer behaviors quickly. By staying informed about customer preferences and market dynamics, retailers can adjust their strategies to remain relevant.
Clienteling in retail is built upon several key pillars. These components encompass customer engagement, data utilization, and personalized services. Below are five pillars of retail clienteling that you should make part of your approach.
Shoppers don’t want to be just a transaction. If they are, they are likely to be a one-and-done visitor. Enter robust customer profiles, which help paint a picture of your shopper as an individual. It’s more than just contact information. An insightful customer profile features personal information, notes, customer-specific KPIs and a “look” into the person’s closet.
Store associates at Tiffany & Co. do a good job of capturing customer information to augment their clienteling efforts. They take notes about personal events like birthdays, anniversaries and weddings. As a result, it is easier for them to sell to their shoppers for life’s most intimate celebrations.
Shoppers expect associates to have instant access to price and inventory information. It’s why having rich product data is critical to clienteling – with it you’ll never have to turn a customer away for not knowing an answer or not having what they want.
Take endless aisle. Selling stock from any enterprise location opens up the potential for a double-digit lift in sales. It’s more than that, though; when associates are selling, they’re building a relationship based on trust and reliability. This has become increasingly important to shoppers who want to shop brands not only for their product but also for how they are treated.
The shopping journey is far from linear. It often starts with online browsing, only for the customer to make a purchase in person. Or, the customer goes in-store to try on an item, then hits buy from their couch at home. All these touchpoints make it necessary to have a 360-degree view of shopper activity, from past purchase history to item wishlists.
Whether online or in-store, each engagement or transaction is an opportunity to collect data and enrich the customer profile. When a store associate uses a mobile device in this scenario, customer data collection rates may increase by up to 300%. This allows the employee to service the customer better at the moment, and the next time they interact with the brand.
There’s nothing worse than receiving a promotional email for a product you own. However, you can avoid this entirely by using clienteling data to market on a one-to-one level. Notify a customer when a new variation of their favorite shirt is available. Address your client by their preferred name, not the name on their credit card. Invite them to an upcoming event because you know they like yoga. The act of selling becomes a much stronger, trust-based service.
In a Re-tales interview with Kaitlin Gottlieb, Director of Retail Sales and Clienteling at UNTUCKit, she says clienteling isn’t about sale notifications or back-in-stock alerts. It’s about using customer and product information to identify outfit building opportunities or suggest new arrivals based on what a customer already owns. Therefore, clienteling is the many ways in which you can jump off the relationship you’ve already very carefully nurtured.
Like buying, clienteling doesn’t just happen in-store. It’s important to extend customer information beyond the four walls and make it actionable by everyone from customer support to headquarters. Data is everywhere, so it needs to be carefully collected, analyzed and distributed so all employees can use it to engage customers.
Adidas is one brand that arms its customer support agents with as much detail as possible. Within its exclusive app is a live chat feature, where its on-demand service reps have access to product details, stock levels, and shopper information. They use this information to guide the shopper wherever they are in their path to purchase.
The quality of a shopping experience goes a long way in determining a brand and customer relationship. Clienteling efforts can have a quantifiable impact if sales associates are able to easily access and quickly act on the right information, anytime and anywhere.
When associates engage in clienteling activities, the total number of transactions (online and in-store) can increase by 5%. Even more, customers who are clientelled to have a 4x higher average annual spend. It’s easy to see the undeniable power of being proactive.
With clienteling, you can transform your customer experiences into high-touch and personal relationships that stick.
Learn how to create a personalized shopping experience at your store with NewStore’s clienteling and remote selling solutions.
