The Clienteling Podcast
The Clienteling Podcast
An Interview with BSPK's CEO Zornitza Stefanova
In this episode, Zornitza Stefanova joins the show and is interviewed by Bryan Amaral. Zornitza is Founder and CEO at BSPK, a global clienteling platform.
She was an early employee of Wired, (acquired by Conde Nast), eGroups (acquired by Yahoo) as well as Six Apart (a division of Say Media), imeem (MySpace), Prosper and other Silicon Valley technology innovators.
During her career, Zornitza has led product strategy and business development with a focus on consumer apps, as well as B2B services. She has been a guest speaker at multiple technology events and the entrepreneurship track at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Zornitza was born and raised in Bulgaria. She defected before the fall of the Iron Curtain and was granted political asylum in the United States, where she became a citizen. She graduated from Stanford University with a BA in International Relations and from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with an MBA in Finance. Her passion is the quest for better customer experiences powered by technological innovation and the discovery of better and easier ways to communicate, create and enjoy life and learning in the mobile age.
First, Zornitza shares her personal story and the motivation to create a clienteling solution. Then she shares her perspective on what is happening in today's retail market and what she hears from customers and prospects in Europe and the US. She shares her perspective on how various technological forces and changing customer expectations are necessitating a new way to engage and run retail operations.
Next, Bryan and Zornitza discussed the cultural imperative to be customer-focused and how to overcome change management challenges when transforming the store. Zornitza shared what BSPK believes is the key to associate adoption of new selling technologies.
Finally, Zornitza shared three principles that retailers should keep in mind as they move forward into the next age of retail:
1. Clienteling practices are essential to building loyalty.
2. Adoption stems from technology being an enabler not an obstacle.
3. Digitally enabled associates shows your customer that you are investing in their satisfaction and shows your employees that you are investing in their success.
Enjoy the show!
Resources:
BSPK Website: BSPK.com
Zornitza's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zstefanova/
Bryan’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryanamaral/
Bryan’s Website: https://www.clientricity.net
Bryan’s Email: bryan@clientelingpodcast.com or bryan@retailtechexec.com
Call Bryan: 404-348-4849
Tags: retail clienteling clientricity BSPK
Hello, everyone. I'm Brian Amaral, and welcome to the Clienteling Podcast. In each episode, we'll be talking to the retail industry's most knowledgeable and successful executives, those luminaries that are creating value at the intersection of retail and technology. In every episode, you'll hear about new, innovative, and transformational customer-centric ideas that are redefining shopping and creating high-value customer experiences. If you haven't already done so, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and let your friends know by liking us on social media. So let's get on with the show. Well, hello again, and we're going to have a very exciting show today. Today, we have Zernitsa Stefanova, who is the CEO of BSPK, which is a top clientele and customer engagement SaaS platform that does business with global retail brands. Now, Zernitsa is a serial entrepreneur, as well as a board member, advisor, and business mentor to Silicon Valley startups. She was an early employee at Wired. I think we all remember that. I think it was acquired by Condé Nast at eGroups, which was a Yahoo acquisition, as well as Six Apart, which was part of, say, Media, I Mean, which was a MySpace acquisition, Prosper and other Silicon Valley technology innovators. Now, during her illustrious career, she has led product strategy and business development with a focus on consumer apps as well as B2B services. She's been a guest speaker on multiple technology events, as well as the entrepreneurship track at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Zorinitsa was born and raised in Bulgaria, and she defected prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain and was granted political assignment in the United States where she became a citizen. She graduated from Stanford with a BA in international relations in the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania with an MBA in finance. Her passion is the quest for better customer experiences powered by technology, innovation, and discovery of better and easier ways to communicate, create, and enjoy life and learning in the mobile age. Well, hello, Zrenica. It is great to have you on the show. Thanks for making some time for me and my listeners.
SPEAKER_00:Hi, Brian. It's a pleasure. Thank you for inviting
SPEAKER_02:me. I'm glad we can do this. I'm happy to say you and I have gotten to know each other a little bit over the last couple of years. We've certainly had some great conversations. You've really had quite an interesting background. Today, as a CEO of BSPK, this clientele and customer engagement platform, you've been working with some of the world's really upper echelon luxury retailers in Europe and some here in North America. You've You have this really interesting background of having been in the Silicon Valley area. Obviously, you've got an extraordinary educational pedigree. What I'd like to understand a little bit here is, tell us a little bit more about your story. By the way, before I even go into that, I did want to mention that some of the customers that you're working with really are great companies. I think you've got Bonpois. Messehara, Joseph Duclos, and several others that we were talking about, I think J.M. Weston. So how did you go from kind of the background that we just described to kind of where you are today? Maybe you can walk us through that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, with pleasure. Of course, my journey into BSPK and why I started BSPK was was inspired by a great shopping experience. And just to tell the story briefly, I was on a business trip and I walked into a luxury boutique in Las Vegas, was not even shopping. I just had a little bit of time before my flight back to San Francisco and I had an excellent shopping experience. I met an associate and he really sort of engaged me and caught my attention. I fell in love with the dress. I wasn't ready to buy. It was a very expensive runway piece. And I ended up not buying. I left the store saying, I'm sorry, I need to think about this. I love this, but I have to think about it. So I got back on the plane, came back to San Francisco. And the next morning, I got a very nice text message with a picture of me trying on the dress and very kind words of like, hey, I'm saving it for you. No pressure, but if you change your mind, it's here for you. And of course, I changed my mind about the dress. I I became a customer of that sales advisor. And I thought to myself, wow, why is that such a rare experience? It was delightful. It was memorable. It was fun. And it really sort of made me think, why doesn't everybody do this? Because now I'm a loyal customer. And I went back to the store and I met a store manager and I spoke with the sales advisors and asked them about how they do their jobs and what they have. And it was quite shocking how Little there was for them to work with. I mean, pen and paper. And as the store manager said, we print out the Salesforce list every morning and I go and highlight names of clients we have to contact. But, you know, the average salesperson, they can think and keep in their head like a dozen customers. And so it kind of became this very futile exercise of trying to build loyalty. And at the same time, we have the flip side of the customer. where all of us want a great experience and want to be recognized and want something special in the moments that matter. And so that was the inspiration, that experience. And as a product strategist, I always, you talked about my background. I mean, I've done music, I've done communication groups, publishing, FinTech, in every instance, The most successful technology was a technology that was so good that it was invisible. It really sort of made the experience so awesome that people got the experience without thinking about how it's empowered. And I thought that in retail, that's what was lacking and even to this day is lacking because the tools that sales advisors have, the opportunities that brands have for technology transformation are really far far, far behind the ease of use and intuitive interface, intuitive experiences that not only customers, but also salespeople want. And why is that important? It's important because the customer has changed. Our expectations have changed. You know, everybody started with the megaphone marketing, the big campaigns of the flashy everything because it's so transactional. And instead, where we engage is where it get that human touch and attention. Humanizing, right? Yeah, and recognition. So that's how BSPK started and that's how we have been successful.
SPEAKER_02:Well, that is kind of at the core of good clienteling, good outreach, good follow-up, particularly on item holds and things like that. The conversion rates on that, of course, are through the roof. And it's through the roof because the customers really do sometimes need to consider what they're going to do. But if you reach back out to them, if you're and constant communication, you become sort of that, almost like that best friend that prompts them along in order to take a certain, creating demand and creating that next thing. So I think, you know, you starting there with this, obviously you understand this very deeply today and you've worked with a lot of retailers that have identified all of those practices that really make a difference. You know, when we talk a little bit about, you know, what you're hearing from customers, you know, most of our listeners, a We try to give them a broader perspective on what's happening in the market. Because, of course, any retailer is really only seeing the world through their particular lens. So maybe you can share a little bit about what you're hearing from all those retailers that you're out there talking with.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, of course. Retailers know that they need to change. Everyone recognizes and is aware of the need to change because the customer has changed. The customer expectations are different. You have a generation that is tech savvy, multiple generations that are tech savvy, that are used to Instagram, their iPhones, TikTok, YouTube, Google. I mean, everything, everything is at your fingertips and it's getting easier and easier. And then, of course, we have e-commerce and e-commerce is an incredible convenience, but e-commerce is disorienting It's kind of breaking that human touch, the connection, the loyalty. It's hard for brands to stand out and differentiate. And so it's really kind of challenging for a retailer who used to have a very loyal customer to maintain that. I mean, conversion and loyalty, they vary depending on the sector and they vary by brand, but the part that is pretty consistent across the board is the retention of that first-time customer. It's about 2%. So imagine all these gigantic budgets that are being invested in marketing and automation and all that kind of stuff. And at the end of the day, 2% or less of your customers are coming back and becoming a loyal customer. And so there's definitely a recognition that change needs to happen. However, what is difficult for Retail, especially, you know, less tech savvy, sort of more kind of legacy brand, I shouldn't call legacy, but sort of those brands used to be very strong in the area of loyalty, is that how do you drive retail transformation with the adoption rate that you need by your sales advisors? How do you handle the change manager? How do you use your data? Digitally native brands are very good at this. They have lots and lots of data. They come from a technical background very often or are founded by people with a technical background. So they have this very deep understanding of how to collect data, how to transform data, and what to do with it. For the brick and mortar retail brand, the direction is in the opposite. You have to start from your store. store network and figure out how to connect the dots on the entire client journey on the omni-channel experience from the website to your store back to the website to your sales advisor from the sales advisor to the website and really bring because from the client point of view it doesn't matter where you shop as a customer of a brand you want you don't care what that thing is called if it's called omni-channel or something else you just want a great experience everywhere you don't think about it and so for From the brand point of view, the technology adoption is very difficult. The change management is difficult. Knowing how to connect the dots on the data side is difficult. So, yeah, that is kind of where we hear brands experience challenges.
SPEAKER_02:I get it. Yeah, you know, you brought up kind of a topic there that when I speak with retailers, I try to think about, get them thinking about stores without walls. Consumers no longer think about the channels the way the retailer thinks about the channel. So how do you create these omni-channel, these kind of seamless experiences? And certainly the kinds of tools that you're doing at BSPK makes that possible. So where do you think the, obviously the in-store part of that, the in-store experience is changing. How are you seeing that it's different than a few years ago and where do you think it's going? Just kind of a real quick response on that would be great.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you know, behaviors that retailers are trying to support in stores, certainly clienteling, that need to engage the customer in a more human way. There's a lot of talk about mobile checkout, which means that you don't have the cashier's register and, you know, the salesperson can help you anywhere in the store. That mobility is important. Having service desks with the idea that it's kind of like, I think it was inspired by Apple's Genius Bar, where you can go and get extra service. And then there's a lot of investment, especially in the luxury sector in nicer stores, you know, the temple store where you walk. It's like, wow, I love being here. The
SPEAKER_02:experience is just walking through the front door sometimes,
SPEAKER_00:right? Yeah. And I think that's not just in luxury anymore, by the way, that is certainly being adopted and trickling down to the rest of the, you know, the entire pyramid of, from affordable and aspirational all the way to luxury.
SPEAKER_02:Well, if you're going put somebody going to go through the trouble of going into a store, you've got to give them something that they can't just click on online, right? You want to give them some kind of experience, something that's memorable, some kind of information, something that's different. And I think it's why that's all happening. Okay, let's talk a little bit about measurement and about how you think about measurement. You know, there's this old adage, you can't measure, I mean, pardon me, you can't manage what you can't measure, right? I just wanted to know a little bit about how do you think about performance and metrics with the organizations you're working with? Are you translating those online metrics into the omni-channel world, into the in-store part of that? And maybe just kind of walk us through some of the key metrics Your solution is currently tracking for clients. And what are the implications you've seen of having access to all of this information and empowering sales associates to do these proactive outreach and engagement sorts of behaviors?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, with BSPK, we bring that transparency and access to data that a traditionally e-commerce brand would have. We bring that into the store because all of a sudden you have the sales force, the people in the store really getting to know the customer. And BSPK is an incredibly easy to use tool. I mean, there's no training required. So now all that data is being very easily captured in the customer interactions, in the service to the client. And so, you know, with BSPK, we help sort of that enrichment of the customer data because most brands, you know, they have a name and maybe an email and maybe a phone number where we PSPK, all this wealth of data in terms of the outreach, the connection, what brought the customer back, what pictures were engaged with them, et cetera, et cetera. All of that data is now available and gives a much better understanding of the client journey. And so the measurement is really built around that. For the customers that we engage with, the first and foremost measurement important metric is adoption because without adoption any technology is not particularly useful and that's where by the way as a company as a solution BSPK truly shines with the brands we work with we're deployed everywhere in every store where BSPK is being used daily and we hear from our customers saying to us our associates cannot work without BSPK anymore it's an essential absolutely critical tool for them to their daily job so adoption is the first measure we put in place then we're going to repeat usage and that's where daily usage daily engagement time spent working with the client helping the client engaging the client through BSPK comes next conversion conversion rates what's truly unique now with client telling is that conversion rates you know used to be that in retail you have a very high conversion rate with a very tiny sliver of your client base, the VIPs, right? The dozen clients that any associate can keep in their head. With BSPK, now it's possible to scale that to the average salesperson, not even average, but every salesperson being able to work with several hundred clients and give them that human touch and customization and tailoring. And of course, those several hundred clients then go, they tell all their buddies. They'll be all of a sudden really in That network effect, right. because for some of our brands, share of transactions are really conducted after the client has been engaged through BSPK are really through the roof. And I can't speak about specific numbers because they're confidential, but it's really powerful. That's how we measure success at every touchpoint, every metric that's for the business.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I know you can't share specific customers and I won't share specific ones, but I will share some specific numbers that I've seen around organizations that really make clienteling an important part of their training, an important part of how their associates engage customers. And using a control group, I saw one major department store retailer to get between 350 and 400% larger spend out of the group that they were kind of driving these proactive behaviors with. So So it's been proven time and time and time again. The other thing that's interesting is that you can look at the behaviors of kind of your average client and then try to figure out, okay, if this is how my best clients work, how many of those kind of B clients, B customers, can I get to start looking like my A customers? And it doesn't take very many of those converting to make a huge difference to top line revenue, which ultimately means there's a margin contribution that becomes very, very significant. And the whole metrics of the business change. So I'm sure the people that you're working with are seeing some great performance in terms of how their organization is shifting with the customers, not only their best customers, but that next tier down of customers that really are able to spend at a higher level when they get that personal service and it drives them. My next question was really around this. I mean, obviously we're talking a little bit about transformation inside of these businesses. Organizations tend to resist, or people inside the organizations tend to resist, you know, kind of maintaining a status quo. And you were saying that adoption is a really strong aspect of what the value proposition is that BSPK is able to do. But maybe you could talk to us a little bit about where you do see friction and what is it about what you're doing that is making it easier to get broad adoption? Because in many cases, we have historically seen that being across all different vendors and all different retailers, we've seen the adoption always being kind of a resistance point that has to be overcome. So how do you think about that and what is it that you're doing that makes that different?
SPEAKER_00:Well, ease of use is the path to easier path to adoption. If you have a technology, if you have a solution that's easy to use, it will be adopted. And being able to do that well is the hard part. And that's why a lot of the times when solutions are not adopted, especially in-house build solutions. I mean, I can't say how many times we've run into a brand that spent millions of dollars on like three, four years building something and then nobody's using it. I've seen that so many
SPEAKER_02:times. Absolutely. I've seen that so many times. I
SPEAKER_00:know. Exactly. And, you know, as a company, you know, that's our secret sauce that we come from a background of having seen that done that for a very long time. And specifically, you know, when I think, you know, I am, you know, very focused on maintaining and enhancing and improving the ease of use of BSPK because I know from my experience in music streaming, in groups, in publishing, in fintech, unless you have a solution that is so easy, the technology kind of becomes, you know, just it's technology, but it's not in your way. It's an enabler. compared to an obstacle it will not get adopted and so that is the extremely strong focus of what we've done and that's how BSPK gets adopted because every time we go and speak to a sales advisor and give a demo like oh my god I would love to have this right and so our biggest champions in these organizations are the sales people who come go back to their manager and say you have to see this and that's how we have been successful so ease of use very very important for organizational change. And you're absolutely right, that transformation step, change management, it's a hard one. But if you add on top of the traditional challenges around change management, you know, training your Salesforce, educating, you know, sharing... Monitoring and
SPEAKER_02:managing, yeah, all that,
SPEAKER_00:right. If you add technology to that, that becomes very difficult. And so with BSPK, it's actually the opposite because we take technology out of the picture, we can It's super easy. And so for the retailer, it's then possible to say, oh my God, you're now empowered. Well, guess what? When you empower your salespeople, they're motivated because they're no longer kind of a proxy, you know, a human checkout cash register. There's meaning to their job. They get to know the customer. They're tasked with getting to know the customer. There's greater ownership of the outcome of your effort, right? And so it drives...
SPEAKER_02:You're empowering them.
SPEAKER_00:You're empowering them. It drives motivation and it drives success. So it kind of becomes this very positive self-reinforcing cycle where all of a sudden, and this is one thing that we've heard repeatedly from our customers, like, wow, we were so surprised how our Salesforce engaged with BSPK. And that's really, you know, has been a driver for us to be able to pursue our vision and serve our customers in the ways in which they're also successful.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. That's great. You know, you actually covered the next question I was going to ask you, so I'm going to move on to something else because you really kind of gave me some great insights there. Um, the, um, uh, the, the, what I guess I want to talk a little bit about is, you know, my personal experience having worked with retailers, both large and small, um, for, for decades now, you know, is that smaller store formats and luxury brands tend to be more adept at creating that deep clienteling kind of customer intimacy. Uh, Now, that's starting to shift and the larger organizations are trying to get there. But I just thought maybe you could share just a minute or so around, you know, what's the biggest difference between the kinds of companies that you've worked with in terms of how they thought about the customer and how they thought about what was possible inside of their organization, given the way they manage their people, the way that they think about their teams, about the way that they're able to do, let's say, even maintain, you know, kind of a change management process in their organization. Maybe you can just share a little bit about kind of the customer cultures and how they look at things like clienteling differently across different types of organizational formats.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, the most important, you know, kind of cultural difference is that the brands that get clienteling, they understand have a very deep cultural understanding of how important the client relationship is. And what I mean by that is, you know, when you go and shop for something that's important That's an experience. That's a one-time thing. It's kind of a great thing that comes into your daily life as a surprise. Your relationship with the brand and the salesperson and the product is very different from the relationship you might have with something that is just a need. And so when we think about clienteling, it's kind of that distinction between, from a client point of view, what you need versus what you want. The brands that appreciate the value of the relationship are more in the category of selling products and services that I would describe as things you want. If you're shopping for daily supplies, you go on Amazon. It's designed for you to be done as fast as possible. Find what you need, click the one checkout button and you're done.
SPEAKER_02:No discovery, right? I don't want to be doing discovery. I know what I want, you know, and at that point, make it as simple as possible.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. There's no need for a relationship. You don't want a relationship. You just want to be done. You want to be, you know, efficient. Whereas for the things we want, it's the exact opposite. You want to spend time researching your bike, you know, your ski equipment, your travel, you know, plans, your next dress for this party you're going to, your high heels, whatever it is, right? Everybody has different things they're shopping for but but you know you may be shopping for a Leica camera you might spend like three months researching your Leica camera right and so all of that makes a very big difference and the knowledge and experience of the salesperson the way the brand speaks with you the way it recognizes you is super important and smaller sort of more more brands focused on that kind of experience understand the importance of the relationships that's the I would describe that as the first most important important cultural difference in that. You
SPEAKER_02:know, what's been interesting to me over the years is having spoken to clienteling across a lot of different types of brands. And then people will say, well, you take a big box and think of something like a Home Depot or a Lowe's. And they say, well, would clienteling ever work in that environment? Even in those self-service high volume transactional kinds of environments, there are ways that this kind of technology can be leveraged, right? In the kitchen design and bathroom design center where it is a considered sale and somebody's coming in, they're really researching and they're looking at different options and it can be used in that environment in order to kind of stay on top of the project, manage the process with the customer, kind of create that additional demand that's required as they go through maybe a two to five, six month process of making determination if they're going to start this project. Same thing at a contractor desk in that environment. And it's always interesting to me that we use this word retail and shopping as if that is is descriptive in some way. It really isn't. There are so many different modalities, I guess you could say, of terms of what shopping is. How do you compare shopping in a grocery store and shopping in a luxury department store as the same thing? They're completely different experiences in the way that we engage with the product, the way we engage with salespeople, the way we think about these things, and what is transactional versus creating a discovery and demand cycle. Culture, you know, it really is, I think, important for every organization to start to think about who are we, who are our customers, what does that shopping journey look like, and then how do we apply the kinds of feature and functionality that we need to in terms of how to empower our sales associates to kind of drive those eventualities with our customers.
SPEAKER_00:I would add, I completely agree, and I would add actually, I may give a stronger statement, every business, every business has that 20% driving the 80% of sales. Yeah. Every business has a need to build that loyalty. Even the grocery store experience you mentioned, there are aisles where people spend very little time. The aspirational, the things you want is for
SPEAKER_02:yourself. The catering side of it becomes a higher touch
SPEAKER_00:environment. Any of those visits, you might spend 90% of the time in a store in front of that aisle. I think capturing that imagination of the customer, and I do think imagining you know, big box stores, they've realized that in this day and age, when everybody can very quickly copy what everybody else is doing, the client relationship is where you get a differentiation or you tell your story about how you're different. And so that's why they're investing these brands, even though, you know, we call them big box brands, they're looking to create a special area, bringing us more knowledgeable salesperson and create that more rewarding client experience that's also more personalized.
SPEAKER_02:Yep. Well, I know you and I could talk all day because we've done it before. But I thought maybe as we kind of wrap this up, what are kind of the three things that you think retailers should be thinking about today? What advice would you give them? From an operation, from a marketing perspective, when they consider implementing clienteling and trying to extract value from the data that they have today and where they want to go, kind of what's their vision of going forward? What are the three things you think they should be thinking about?
SPEAKER_00:The three things I would recommend is to think about clienteling as a way to build customer loyalty. Indispensable way to engage and really make that customer your friend. And that's how they become a loyal customer. The second thing for sure is of use. Technology is an enabler and not as an obstacle. And it has to be easy to use because that's how it gets adopted, that's how it gets used, and that's how it delivers on its promise of return on investment. And then the third thing is that Great technology and the way in which it's present in the experience in the store represents your brand to your customer who's thinking, are you investing for me? to enable me to have a better experience. But it's also a very important investment for the sales force because the sales person needs to feel that my brand is investing in my ability to be successful. And that's how you get a motivated sales force and that's how you get people to engage and to really drive your business forward. So those are the three things I would recommend. Clienteling, ease of use is an essential element of any technical solution that you bring into your store or your brand. Uh, and also number three, how that, that, that investment represents you to your customers and to your employees.
SPEAKER_02:Yep. That, that great advice there. And, uh, at that, I think we're going to wrap up here, but I want, you know, there's a need to, we really, really appreciate you coming on the show today. You've shared some great insights, um, for anybody that wants more information about BSPK. I'll put all of that in the show notes. Um, Thank you so much for taking a little bit of time out of your always busy day to kind of jump on the show here with us. And we look forward to seeing more great things out of you and the company. So congratulations on all the great success you've had to date. Looking forward to a very powerful future for BSPK. Thanks.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. Thank you, Brian.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you. Thank you.