Calling Mrs. Maisel! Retail Clienteling is Cutting Edge (Again)

Clienteling has evolved from a cumbersome, manual hustle reserved for high-end brands into an accessible, scalable retail tactic. To take full advantage, retailers need to let go of old ways of thinking about store productivity and the crucial new roles store associates play. 

Carol’s guest, Casey Drake, is the VP of Sales for Endear, a retail CRM and clienteling platform that hits the sweet spot where high tech drives high touch experiences. Casey is a self-described “sales and customer service nerd” who brings a fresh and timely perspective on the future of customer engagement. 

This episode wraps up Carol’s People Powered Retail series where Casey and Carol pick up from their NRF 2024 chat during KWI’s Retail Re-Stored series.  

Episode highlights:

·      Why personalization might not be all it’s cracked up to be (and what could be even better).

·      How new handoffs between technology and people power can add exponential reach.

·      Why stores need fresh metrics and attribution models to reach their full potential.

·      The game-changing impact of borrowing B2B tactics for B2C.

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Transcript

Carol Spieckerman

So hi Casey. It's great to have you on the show.

Casey Drake

It's great to chat with you again.

 Carol

I wanted to chat with you again because I thought that the perspectives that you shared on all things customer experience were just so fresh and needed right now. So I'm really excited about continuing the conversation.

I want to start with a question that sets an important baseline for everything we'll talk about and maybe even clear up some confusion, what's the difference between clienteling and customer service?  

 Casey

I think the answer is, it's way more proactive. It is clienteling is meant to be sales. I would say it equals sales. In every other world of business, we would call it sales, but in the retail landscape, and more specifically the luxury side of the apparel retail landscape, we call that clienteling, which is really just making sure that the customer is having the best possible experience, whatever that looks like for them. I think the difference again is I'm going to go outbound, I'm going go proactive and make sure that customer has identified themselves as somebody who wants to be clienteled to or if they might be a little lost.

I’m going to double-check and make sure they are happy with their last purchase, that they are aware of sales that are going on, and that they know how to use our buy now pay later function if they want to buy something they had their eye on. Reaching out to be like, “Hey, I'm here to be customer service, but I'm going to go get you instead of waiting for you to come and ask me”

Carol

I like that distinction. The distinction between proactive versus just reactive.  And customer service does tend to be more of a reactive proposition. Clienteling used to just be an elite concept that was reserved for high-end brands and retailers, but it was executed in some pretty old-school ways. People had binders on customers and index cards. How has clienteling evolved since then? And has it been democratized so that more brands retailers and others will have access to it? 

Casey

what has changed the most is the retail associate. The person who's working in that store. I think the problem with clienteling today is that a lot of brands are kind of stuck in the mud a little bit with clienteling and they think it has to be what it was in the eighties, or even earlier than that.  

Marvelous. Mrs. Maisel is one of my favorite shows out there. So funny. If you haven't seen it, you really should check it out. If you've seen it, you know, at the beginning of the show, she is this fifties-era housewife who then gets a job at the department store. And that department store environment is a hustling environment. Those sales ladies know all their clients. They know their daughter's names. They know their sister's names. They know all their friends and their friend groups, and that is how they work their jobs. That is how they're making money. They're hustling and getting those clients, building those relationships. Who is filling the role of retail associate today? We need to accept that first. That's the first thing to democratize. Clienteling is accepting who we are putting in the role of retail associate.

And honestly, who makes the most sense to play the role of retail associate, which I think is not necessarily that “hunter” person except maybe in really specialized luxury retail it would make sense. But I think the best retail associates are your best friends in 30 seconds. They're that kind of person that once you meet them, you are like, “Wow, this person is great.” They just know how to read a room, they're great at social interactions, and they're really organized because retail today is about foot traffic coming in. I need to get that foot traffic out the door with something in their hands in a really efficient way. It is much less of that slow, build-a-client-book process. That's what the retailer wants so they need to be willing to let clienteling adapt to be that as well, 

Carol

I love the reference to the show. The fact that clienteling has always been a grassroots thing. It's always been driven by store associates. It was fundamentally about salespeople using whatever tools were available and at their disposal to get creative, to drive sales. It wasn't brought down from on high, even though of course management and corporate benefited very heavily from the efforts of associates.  

How do you close the gap between store associates that are anxious to use any of the new tools that you'll throw at them and those that might be a little bit more reluctant?

Casey

I think that's where leadership comes in. I've seen it done at the individual store manager level. Having great store managers requires having a really great hiring process and valuing store managers, paying them well, and everything that comes with that. So it's rare that I see this sort of strategizing at the store manager level. Most of the time they're playing in the clienteling world the same role that any individual associate would play. 

Where you need to strategize though, and where the leadership comes into play and where that area manager or director of retail marketing teams can even get involved is when the technology sets up that first message to go out on the associate's behalf. We use this in the B2B world all the time already.

So in my sales world, we're constantly setting up these triggers and moments in time when an email goes out to somebody. If Carol switches jobs and is now working in another role, I immediately get a notification to send Carol an email “Hey, saw you switch jobs, congratulations” and so forth.

All of that can be triggered and automatic, but why are we so hesitant to use any of that in the retail world? Democratizing clienteling is basically saying, “We agree. We have hired you to accept inbound foot traffic, and now we're asking you to be outbound. We're going to do the outbound part for you, and then we're going to have you play the same role in the clienteling world that we asked you to play in your actual store, which is, that you can sit and wait for responses to come back.” We're trying to set up these moments for digital foot traffic where the admin team sets up a thank you message that goes out two days after a purchase and a lapsing customer message that goes out three months after their most recent purchase. And a Valentine's Day special that goes out two days before Valentine's Day to everybody who bought the last holiday special we ran.

All these things are in your data and can be set up to be automatic and then you just tell the store teams, “Hey, these messages go out on your behalf based on these different moments and these different criteria. You just need to monitor this inbox and see if people respond.”

Once they respond, it's your job to take that from there. Now you own it and you are their person. Once they walk through the door of their store, now that's your relationship from there. Marketing gets them into the store and you take the relationship from there. Same thing, but over email and text.

 Carol

Obviously, there must be a training component, but I think that's great that it's more a matter of framing and just saying, Here's your role, and then we've got the rest, and perhaps that does increase the receptivity to them using those tools. 

Casey

What's awesome about the training component is it's the same training you should be doing already for somebody who you're going to hire in your store anyway. 

Carol

It doesn't change.  

Casey

Exactly because it's an inbound. Somebody walks in, somebody messages in, take it from here. Here's how we talk as a brand. Here's our product slide. Here's everything you might need to know that this person might ask you. But you are right. To be proactive and to ask that associate to be that does require additional training beyond what you would already get as an associate.

Carol

Where do you see those handoffs between automation and human intervention?  How would you articulate those handoffs? 

Casey

I’m going to be cautious about using the word “opt-in” because when you say that, everybody thinks marketing opting in. But when the customer is opting into engagement, or maybe we could say showing signs of engagement, the most clear-cut way I have found to define this is responding.

Once they reply to a message, that is the most clear-cut moment. Associate should be stepping in or any human on your team should be stepping in and taking it from there. That customer is taking time to write out manual messages and try to talk to your team. You should give them a human back on your side.

Either make people send you an email and tell them you'll get back to them later, or put a live chat associate on and have it be a real person. If I'm going to take my time to chat, don't just give me a robot back. 

The other example is any form that you can have them fill out anywhere. A style quiz, an appointment booking, or any moment that you can make them put information in and click “submit” on something is also a great engagement moment. Associates should be stepping in and saying something now because the customer did this for us. They gave us some info and showed that they wanted to be interacted with.

Carol

So meet them where they are and in the way that they're meeting you.

Casey

Yep. And it does go back to relevance. Everybody in retail is focused on personalize, personalize, personalize and personalization. I think it's about relevance, not personalization. It's about reaching them at the right moment in time rather than knowing a billion things about them and then showing them in that message that you knew those billion things about them. It's really about knowing they were interested because of XYZ. 

Carol

How do you message your customers in a way that is scalable but also doesn't seem generic while maintaining your unique brand voice?

Casey

It's the moments of relevance that let you do that. Endear is a retail CRM clienteling tool. I like to say retail CRM because I think what we're doing is a little bit more than what people think of as clienteling. Here's a real example of the difference between relevance and personalization: If I know you have previously bought from one of my holiday collections, let's say we're a jewelry brand. I can filter and know from my data that you bought from one of my other holiday collections and at this specific store. 

I can even know that you shopped with this specific user in my account, and then I can create a lookbook of all of my Valentine's Day specials that I think you might be interested in because you've shown you're interested in other holiday specials. Then I can craft that message to you like, “Hey, how have you been? It's me, the person you shopped with coming from the store that you shopped at, talking about the last holiday item that you purchased.”

All of that can be inserted into the message dynamically. It goes to 300 people, but it feels so personalized. The customer thinks “This must be for me. It's coming from the person I shopped with from the store I shopped at. They're talking about the Christmas bracelet that I bought a couple of months ago, and they're referencing this really cute Valentine's Day one that I might be interested in.”

All those things combined feel so personal and that message can be scheduled to go to however many people fall into that bucket The personalized version of that is starting with a store team. “Here's a list. Go one by one down this list and mention something they bought in the past and mention a note that you took about them on their profile,” or “Keep a client book and reach out to the client book about our Valentine's Day special.” But then the question becomes, how many of the associates on your team have really kept that client book and have really had notes in there that they can then bring up in that message?

And then on top of that, does that not even really make a difference compared to the message I just described? That's where I get to with customers and I won't lie to you, it's a battle. I'll ask questions like “So you give your team this list and you give them a good template to start with. How much do they change that template? Be honest with me. Are they just sending that template to the list that you gave them?”  And they admit they're probably just sending the template. And I said “So you could just press it for them. You're just making them press ‘send’ when you could just press send for them.”

Carol

So it sounds like there's not necessarily that much new under the sun, that there are ways to effectively communicate en masse without, adding in all of those special flourishes that take up time and at the end of the day, don't necessarily move the needle.

Casey

Yes. It's, it's a numbers game Again, in the B2B world, in our sales world, we've known and talked about this all the time, right? We do this in almost every single instance. Before the NRF conference, I sent an email to a hundred people that I knew would be at the conference that I had spoken to in the past. The email was basically “I saw you’re going to be at NRF and would love to catch up with you while we’re there.” That feels personal, it went to a hundred people at once, and so it's just a common sort of thing that we do. But for some reason on the retail side, marketing does blast messaging, retail associates do one-on-one only, and it's the way people feel like it needs to be.

But there's something in the middle.

Carol

Great take on that. In one of your YouTube videos, you made another contrarian point, saying that you don't really like the term “customer journey” and I believe the reason you don't like it listening through is that it's maybe too passive. What is your alternative to the customer journey? Maybe one that just more clearly articulates what's at work?

Casey

I've thought about this, and I know there's a term “retail safari” that we use in our world, which is basically, we're going to go shopping and our bosses let us do it on the clock. But it basically means we're going to shop some stores and see some new brands and such.

But you would never just go on a safari on your own. You would always have a guide with you to show you which way to go, and where the cool animals that you want to see are, and everybody will have something different about their favorite part of the safari, right? Somebody loves the zebras. Somebody else thought the elephants were the coolest, but everybody still got a chance to see all of that and the guide made sure that if you might like this, I'm going to make sure you get your eyes on it and I draw your attention to it.

The guide is the sales associate in most cases and if you think about it that way, it gives them so much more value and it gives these conversations so much more value because it's not just trying to get people to buy something.

You can put all this time and effort into a new flow on your website for customers to take a style quiz and then be presented with a lookbook and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all these things. Hours and hours of tech time and all this stuff I did as a brand to make this awesome flow that nobody ever really uses and it doesn't even convert that well.

And the reason is you need someone to just jump in along the way and say, “Hey, I saw you took the quiz. Did you see the lookbook that was generated for you? Did anything catch your eye? Do you have any questions?” Then maybe someone mentions that it’s out of their price point and then you can mention your buy-now-pay-later service where you can pay in four equal installments if you can't afford the full order. You're putting all these pieces in place as a brand and you need someone to help your customer understand the best way to take advantage of those pieces. 

Carol

I love the safari metaphor because it completely changes a perspective of what sales really is these days, which is serving as a guide with the understanding that no two customers are on the same safari or have the same preferences and they get attracted by different things. Leveraging that and working with them rather than just making it this full-on close-a-sale proposition. 

Casey

Totally. Ideally, if you think about it in the journey sense or the close-a-sale sense, that'd be like if your Safari guide's only goal was to get to the end of the safari as fast as possible. That would never be the goal. Everybody would be like, “What the heck is it? This guy's flying like ‘I gotta go.’ We didn’t get to see anything!”

Carol

Yeah. And that's why I have a problem with the “path to purchase” because there are so many other paths that can provide value to the customer and even to the retailer or the brand, even if they don't buy something. And especially now with the benefits of collecting data, and filling out those forms that you talked about.

This series is about people-powered retail, so what does people powered retail mean to you, Casey, with everything that we've talked about?  

Casey

Tech is exploding. It still is today and every single year. You just look around at conferences like NRF and it's incredible. The number of platforms and options and everything that is out there. And retail brands respond by just stacking, right? We call it a “tech stack” for a reason! They just keep piling things on top, and I think to get the most use and the most value, it takes people at the core. If you were to build a wheel and spoke of how tech helps your brand, everything could come back and then go back out from your associate being at the center of it. They are going to make your buy now, pay later, work the best. They are going to make your smart fitting rooms be useful to customers. They're going to make customers use that smart mirror and understand what they can do with it. Every piece of tech along the way requires that human to make it the most helpful it can be and the worst part of is, if you don't have that human there, it can make the experience so much worse.

I think the best example of this is self-checkout at grocery stores. The ones that have the best associates manning them are the best ones to use, right? Whenever you run into an error at the self-checkout at the grocery store and you're looking around and you're like, “Ah, man, where's the person to help me?” Then it becomes frustrating every other time. It's the best in the world when you can just boop, boop scan yourself through. 

Carol

Yeah, one bad experience can just blow the whole thing up. 

When you talk about smart fitting rooms and apps and all the technology, I think a lot of times brands and retailers create all of these new bells and whistles and they have a lot of promise, but if a customer doesn't know they're even there, or to your point how to use them, then it all falls apart and everybody can say, “Well, that didn't work.”

Casey

Yep. You need people to buy in. There are a lot of platforms out there right now in the resale space and a lot of brands are trying to take some of that back. That requires awareness. Sort of baby-stepping a customer to understanding how to use the resale side of the brand. If a brand can do that, then I think resale can take off. But I think it takes a lot of customer education. 

Carol

Yep. And who better to provide it than the store associates?

Casey

Exactly. I think the biggest problem facing retail and brick and mortar retail specifically, is how we set goals. Far too many store associates that I talk to in stores that I work with are still goaled on the transactions that take place at their point of sale system. And if that's how you goal your team, they will try to get people to only check out at their POS system, which would mean not taking advantage of a lot of other options.   

Carol

What are some of the criteria that you would advocate for that go beyond just closing a sale? 

Casey

With Endear, we do message attribution. So whether that sale happens in your online web channel, whether it goes through your buy now, pay later channel, your resale channel, whatever channel that sale goes through shouldn't matter. What should matter is how that sale gets attributed. 

I'll be honest, some brands just turn off the attribution when they start using Endear thinking that it will be confusing and it breaks my heart. But an associate can send a message to a customer and if they buy something online, you get credit for it.

Even though the tech's just not there yet, an associate still might be able to make the sale happen when a customer can’t afford it. They can say, “Let me grab your phone number. I'm going to send you a link to the shirt online, and then you can use our buy now pay later function and pay it off in four equal installments if that would work for you.

And now as an associate, I feel empowered to do that because I know my CRM or my system or the way my goals are tracked, I'll get credit for that sale. It doesn't matter if they leave the store and go buy online. I still get that.

Carol

That goes right back to what we were talking about earlier in the conversation –

clienteling is anticipating needs and proactively recommending actions. That will get them where they want to go. 

Casey

Exactly. I think overall the coolest thing I've seen come out of Endear is the morale boost when the people that work at that store start to feel like “Oh, I'm not just a cog in the machine. I'm a part of this brand, I have an impact on a lot of things going on” instead of just sitting at this store that's disconnected from everything else. 

Carol

Well, it would seem to also encourage creativity and make store associates just feel more fulfilled and more creative in their roles.

Casey

Yeah, totally. I totally agree. It gives them a sense of ownership because you get a goal put on you, but then you're left to foot traffic. You have to hope the foot traffic comes in that lets you hit that goal. And this gives you a little bit more ownership over your future and success. 

Carol

Hopefully, more of your clients and more brands in general will start using the full suite of services and not cut off the ones that really can make a difference in associate morale and, at the end of the day, the bottom line.

I end every interview with one question that I'll post to you now, Casey. What’s next?

Casey

I see a huge investment in AI coming next and I think everybody sees that coming next. Everyone is going crazy about AI and what AI can do for you. But I hope that isn’t what’s next because you need to be putting that human in place to make it work really well. So, what I hope is next in retail is an adjustment on how we are valuing stores. More brands need to not just look at the bottom line of a store. 

A store is a BOPIS location, so buy online, pick up in store. It’s an E-commerce fulfillment channel, right? That doesn't hit that store's bottom line, but that's value that they add to the brand. It's a fulfilling, same-day shipping opportunity. So there are all these different areas where stores now add value to your brand but they’re not accounted for. We do all these things and then we look at the bottom line and ask, “Did they bring in more money than it cost in rent and salaries and all of that?” And it's harder to do nowadays when you get half as much foot traffic as you used to.

And those customers that do come in might just check things out then buy online so the store misses that one. So there are just so many ways that you can adjust the way that you value your stores. I hope that's what's next. I hope people start to see they’re looking at things the wrong way. We need to adjust the way that we set goals and value a store's performance.

Carol

it makes a lot of sense. And companies like Endear are developing the capabilities that allow for that more nuanced thinking.   

Casey

I am still relatively new to this industry. I'm just eager, I want to see people look at these things and be like, “Oh my gosh! A store could be 30 times as valuable as the sales that just get done at that store on that day.”

Carol

I think the pieces are starting to come together. I think that's the good news. It doesn't seem like a pipe dream.

Casey, I'm so glad that we continued the conversation. So many new fresh insights as always from you. I encourage everyone to visit Endearhq.com And, you have a YouTube channel, right? 

Casey

Yes, I have a YouTube channel that's Casey from Endear.  

Carol

Thank you so much, Casey. I look forward to staying in touch and watching everything unfold and following your insights in 2024.

Casey

Thank you!