The Clienteling Podcast
The Clienteling Podcast
Talking Clienteling with John Liebler - Part 2 of 2
John Liebler Interview Pt. 2 of 2
In this episode, John Liebler joins the show and is interviewed by Bryan Amaral. John is a senior executive offering 30+ years of visionary leadership in-store operations, multi-unit management, and operations logistics with brands such as Kay Jewelers, Jared, Peoples Jewelers and Shinola. He is a passionate, motivational leader who builds successful, inspired, and customer-focused sales teams that drive results.
First, John describes the challenges of implementing clienteling. Nobody wants to spend a substantial sum of money on technology and then have no one use it. John has had both successes and misses; he reveals the top three things that have most impacted clienteling:
1. The most tenured salespeople are resistant. So, John would reach out to this group and get their feedback on the technology before and after implementation. You need to be willing to make changes.
2. John did not fully understand the impact that technology would have on the selling process. When do you capture guest information? How will technology impact the sales process? If not careful you could be losing the guest’s engagement. Some issues didn’t come to light until after testing the technology.
3. Make sure you get the data right. John had a big challenge with duplicate records.
Then, John reveals the most effective metrics:
· Sales made after outreach.
· New guest acquisition.
Later, John explains the importance of getting your customer’s name. Every customer that comes into your store is an opportunity. In many organizations, they did secret shopping. They find out if their salespeople captured a name and if they did an outreach. From there, his team would create KPIs and create a training around it.
John shared his formula regarding transforming with new technology.
OP+NT=EOP (Old Process plus New Technology equals Expensive Old Process).
There are three things that incredibly important when implementing clienteling:
1. Choosing the right solution.
2. Putting the steps in place to ensure a successful implementation. Don’t let the business drive the timeline.
3. Drive user-adoption.
Enjoy the show!
Timestamps:
• [01:00] About John Liebler
• [03:00] The most significant challenges with adopting clienteling
• [09:30] Perfection is the enemy of progress
• [11:00] The most effective metrics
• [16:45] Advice for implementing clienteling
Resources:
John’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnliebler1/
John’s Website: https://retailsuccessconsulting.com/
Call John: 330-283-6449
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
Quotes:
¨ “There is going to be a hesitancy to use a new system.” -John
¨ “Getting it right the first time becomes extremely important.” -John
¨ “You have to give a reason for the customer to give you their name that’s noninvasive.” -John
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, welcome back. We are going to continue on after show one, now with show two, with an interview with John Liebler. John has over 30 years of retail experience, very broad-based experience in store operations, strategy, logistics, customer experience, and store technology. And John started his career on the floor in a retail sales environment and has been a divisional vice president of store operations for 700 King Jewelers locations. He then went on to transition into operations administration for a$6 billion specialty retailer with over 3,500 locations. And he's really touched every aspect of the business at scale, right? Responsible for field communications, training, repair, new store openings, corporate policies and procedures, and in-store technology. What's nice is that John has really worked both in large and small retailers and implemented clienteling and various customer-centric initiatives. I've had the pleasure of working with John in the past. If you want to know a little bit more about John, we have, go back and listen to the first show. And John has spent a fair bit of time walking us through his philosophy around clienteling, gave us a lot of narrative around what really constitutes a great clienteling experience, talked a lot about the whole process of moving from manual, what he was calling a PT book, a clienteling, the black book, and moving that into a technology platform, that whole process of getting alignment within the organization and getting the right people participating in that and making sure that they ultimately own it. And then the challenges of a big organization versus a small organization and how do they adapt and how do they adopt the So, John, welcome back. And we have some more questions we didn't get to in the first one. And I appreciate you hanging around a little longer with me here so that we can continue talking.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, Brian, thank you for having me back. This is my pleasure.
SPEAKER_01:Well, you've shared so many great ideas. I could listen to you all day here. So let's talk a little bit about what I think is the biggest issue that I've seen out there. And it happens at the early stage when you first start talking to the retail executives. It certainly is the difference between success and failure. And that is adoption, right? So where do you see the biggest challenges of adoption? And in some of the projects you did, what did you do about it? What advice would you give other retailers that are kind of looking to implement a customer-centric solution like clientele?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. Yeah, Brian, I think that is really the most important question, right? Nobody wants to spend a substantial sum of money on technology and then have no one use it. We definitely had some successes and I've definitely had So I will tell you the three things that I've seen that most impacted specifically as it related to client telling. But I think this goes for most store facing technology implementation was number one. We ran into a situation where our most tenured salespeople were resistant.
SPEAKER_01:You know, they've
SPEAKER_00:been doing it for a long time, 15, 20 years. It's worked for me. Right. And typically your tenures are also very, very successful. So why would I want to change that, which I'm doing? And so to solve for that, to a certain degree, it became in the pre-implementation phase where I've talked about at length in the previous podcast about making sure the end user is part of the conversation. So you create those evangelists and more than that, you're building something that they like. And so it becomes when they get the new system, they're like, oh, this makes sense to me. But there also has to be a post process. So one of the things that we instituted was number one, post interviews. And so we would reach out to our most tenured salespeople and all the way through and then even post-implementation and get their feedback as what was going well, what was not going well. Number two, we had a lot of round table discussion. So we would bring people in and we would whiteboard out again what was going well and not going well. And these were people at all levels of the organization. And then we were willing to make changes. And so I don't, we built this sort of agile light rather than pure agile, right? We didn't do scrums and whatnot, but we did build it in sprints. So we had the MVP, but then what we were able to do is we built these all out in two-week sprints. So we were able to move things around. And so as we got the feedback, we were able to then change on the fly to a certain degree what the next rollout looked like or change what we had already implemented because that was number one.
SPEAKER_01:Yep. One of the things I wanted to mention here is unlike a lot of retailers, the particular retailer that you were working with at the time really made a decision to go ahead and build a platform because they really needed to start, really rebuild everything in their enterprise. The under customer data architecture really wasn't there. and kind of moving through that process.
SPEAKER_00:Well, and I appreciate that. And we have taken that to other retailers who did not do an internal build, right? Who bought something sort of, quote, off the shelf. But we didn't turn on all this technology, all the functionality at one time. It wasn't a big bang. It was, you know, let's get some of the core functionality out there, right? And then once that got baked in, then you can turn on things as you go. And so that what happens then is you're really building a foundation of core behaviors. And then you build on those behaviors. A lot of times what I've seen is you just launch all out there and people get lost in so many options. And so I do strongly advise that becomes a best practice approach, which leads me to the second piece that was a catalyst and I'll take full ownership, it was a miss on my part. I did not fully understand the impact that the technology in someone's hand would have in the selling process. So for instance, one of the core behaviors you have with clients clienteling is you want to capture guest information. Well, when do you capture that? Do you capture the greeting? Do you capture the end of the sale? You have guests who didn't make a purchase, but you want to capture that. Suddenly you have an iPad in somebody's hand and they're trying to type on an iPad. Well, now you're losing the guest connection. So do you introduce a client capture card? Does the customer fill it out? Like all of those real interesting behaviors didn't come to light until after we launched the system. Now, obviously you can then, as you launch out future systems with future clients, anticipate that. But But I do think it's critical to try to anticipate the impact that that technology will have on
SPEAKER_01:the day-to-day selling. Yeah, it does change process. There's no question about it. And it's a matter of trying to keep the best of what works in terms of the human connection and having the technology to support it without it being distraction.
SPEAKER_00:Correct. And then the last piece, and there's a number of things, but I think this is really critical, is making sure you get the data right, especially with clienteling. I wish I had a
SPEAKER_01:bell, John.
SPEAKER_00:I wish I had a bell on that one. Ding, ding, ding, ding, right? You know, we had a very big challenge, and I've seen this now in a couple of clienteling rollouts, with just duplicate records, right? So how are you making sure that you're de-duping effectively? How are you not continuing to create duplicate records, right? So are you creating a record in POS? It's also being subsequently recreated in clienteling and it becomes two of the same. What is your ongoing de-duping process? I mean, this is obviously important for an execution standpoint, but it's really important for a credibility standpoint. When you've got a field team that you're saying we want you to use this there's going to be hesitance to use the new system if they don't believe in the system they're going to start naturally looking for reasons why not to use it and if the data is not right they're just going to go nope and it's really hard to create hype get everyone excited have them jump into the system and have it not work and then try to get them back into it again because you've lost that credibility so yeah getting it right the first time i think becomes extremely important
SPEAKER_01:yeah it does and i've seen that i mean you know a done an awful lot of implementations over the years. And, you know, sometimes you have the ability to influence the IT organization more than others to get things cleaned up before you start. And I've even seen pilot projects that, you know, lingered for three years because they couldn't get their data right. And people would go in and do a search on a customer and it would show up six different times in there and they wouldn't know which one had the right transaction history. You know, it's all kinds of issues like that. So you have the issue. Yeah. So it really is. I It needs to be virtually perfect. And I know that you guys did a lot of work in and around that. So let's talk a little bit about tracking the effectiveness of clienteling once you actually kind of have in place. What kind of metrics were you thinking about? What were maybe some of the soft benefits that made an overall impact on the company?
SPEAKER_00:Right. Before I go, I want to go back to one thing you just said, because I think it's really important. Someone once said to me that perfection is the enemy of progress. It's important that what you launch works perfectly. What's not important is that you launch a perfect system. And so I'm agreeing with you, but what I want to make sure people know is that rather launch out minimum functionality that works really, really well, as opposed to lots of function, right? You have the option to launch out in next releases, more functionality, but if only does three things, do it really, really well, because you won't get people back into the system, right? Yep.
SPEAKER_01:That's great advice. Yeah. Great advice.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. I appreciate it. Yeah. So going back to what you're asking as it relates to tracking effectiveness, This was definitely a labor of love, especially when it comes to clientele, because understanding how not only guest capture, but then store outreach, how that's driving effectiveness beyond what would be new merchandise programs, new marketing programs, who's getting credit for that, right? Especially when you're building a CRM, which you can't really test, right? It's a 360 view of the customer for all stores. So could you have turned client telling on and some stores not turn it on. Yes. So I think it's important for organizations when they are starting to launch the system, trying to understand how they're going to see that and doing the A-B testing. To be real detailed, the metrics that I found most effective, number one were sales made after outreach. And we put a specific timeline on it. And you can choose seven days, 12 days, 14 days, but from all channels. One of the things that I'm hearing quite a bit from clients is stores are getting increasingly frustrated that they meet, work with a guest, and then the guest goes and buys it on.com and they don't get credit. Now, whether that credit is through a P&L or it's just secondary recording of the data, omni-channel means omni-channel, right? So having sort of these market-related P&Ls becomes very important. That's probably for another show. But we definitely said to our teams, look, if you get captured customer information and you do an outreach and they make a purchase, we're going to gamify that and give you credit so we can at least measure it and see who's doing well, who's not doing well. So that was number one.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's great because you're doing attribution. I mean, at the end of the day, so much of this activity, we really have to be able to attribute it back to some, whether it's a marketing piece and there's a lot of new technologies out there trying to track the attribution of specific online and social media marketing and whatnot. Does that actually create an in-store experience? But one of the nice things we can do, and I know you did in your clienteling solution, was to make sure that every outbound communication that came, you were able to have a single view of the customer and then know whether or not that customer responded. Exactly right. To the kind of communication that went out and therefore you could apply the attribution directly, which is incredibly powerful.
SPEAKER_00:Spot on. The other metric that actually did not measure my initial time doing this, but learned over a couple of other implementations of a client on your product was new guest acquisition. So if you consider just You have 100 guests that walk in a store in a given period of time. You have a 10% conversion. So 90% of the people came in and left. That's 90 people that really are invisible to us. And so one of the other metrics we pushed was trying to capture a percentage of those people. Now, that's tricky, right? You have to give the customer a reason to give you their name that's non-invasive. And that becomes very difficult from a selling standpoint. But once you teach that, now what happens is you're capturing this huge group of people that didn't buy something, but you're creating a loyalty and an emotional connection, and they will come back to you again. And if you think in terms of, we'll just use jewelry again, a gentleman coming in who's looking at an engagement ring, he's not going to buy it the first time he walks in the store. But how do I build out such a relationship to where he's going to say to me, yeah, let's talk again when I'm more ready. And then I can create a reason as his advisor to reach out to him in a non-invasive way just to continue to build that relationship. And that strategy can be implemented across really any retailer.
SPEAKER_01:Certainly any considered sale, right? I mean, anything that's a considered sale, you really want to start in that process as early as possible to understand who that customer is and use it as a way to share content or to share ideas, invite them to store events. There are so many things that you can do before they actually spend dollar one with you.
SPEAKER_00:Correct. You know, just recently I was at the National Retail, the NRA And I'm a student of retail. So when I'm bored, I go shop. That's what I do. I love it. And I had this thought in my head that I was going to go into stores and I would buy something and they only had to do, there was only one behavior they had to exhibit and I would make a purchase in that store. So I think I hit 53 stores over the course of a couple of days, Brian. Some of the top stores in New York, like these are the cream of the crop, the flagship stores. I made zero purchases. And do you know what my criteria was?
SPEAKER_01:I have no idea. What was your criteria?
SPEAKER_00:They had to get my name. If somebody simply was able to go and get me to say, yeah, I'm John, I would have made a purchase. And I never saw it. I saw variations on greetings. There were some that were perfunctory, some were this, some were that. I had this one gentleman really do a phenomenal job explaining the brand. And he gave me his name. His name was Brandon. So shout out to Brandon. But not one person in all of these stores effectively said, what's your name? And then took it from there. And if you do any reading on human behavior, getting and using a name is really number one. Absolutely. edited later, was we added a couple of questions to the secret shop, which were, do they ask me my name? Do they capture information? And did they complete an outreach? We would then go back into the clienteling system. So we would pull the data from the secret shop with their shopper's names, and we would see, did they do an outreach? And what did that outreach look like and sound like? And then we created KPIs around that, and then behavioral training around that. Extremely impactful.
SPEAKER_01:That's great. That's great. So you basically, as opposed to just trying to go back and survey customers, you actually had very specific tactical people going in to do this. And then you could close the loop on that and taking those learnings as a way to enhance the program. That's a great way to do it. That's great, John. So what advice would you give other retail operations and marketing execs that are either considering implementing clienteling for the first time or perhaps trying to extract Yeah, I
SPEAKER_00:think that's an amazing question and probably could be one for an entirely other podcast. But to sort of try to summarize it, I think there are three things that are incredibly important. Number one, choosing the right solution, then putting steps in place so you ensure a successful implementation. And then finally, and you brought it up a number of times, is how do you go and drive user experience? adoption, right? And if you take them sort of one at a time, choosing the right solution. When I was with the publicly traded$6 billion company, we had a very clearly defined RFP process. And we would put vendors through the ringer. I have not seen that process in a number of other engagements. And sometimes people are choosing solutions because of the person that was presented to them, because they have a buddy who owns the company. Make sure you have a clear process. And that needs to have a clearly defined goal. What are the KPIs? Start with the end in mind, right? Exactly.
SPEAKER_01:What behaviors are you trying to drive? What kind of journeys are you trying to support? Make sure that the vendors you're talking to have the capacity to be able to address that fully for you.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. And I don't know if you remember this, Brian, but one of the things I had in my whiteboard in my office was a little algebraic formula that was NT plus OP equals EOP. So I know this is a podcast so people can't see it, but basically that stands for new technology plus old process equals expensive old process. And I forget who you may have been the one who brought that to my mind, but one of the things that I think is really important, and I've seen this in multiple implementations, is where people want to bend the technology to fit their antiquated processes. And most technologies exist because they're built on best practices from dozens and dozens of other retailers. Be willing to change processes because if not, you end up with a highly customized solution that is very difficult to manage down the road. So I think that would be number one as it relates to advice. Ensuring a successful implementation, again, clearly define those expectations. Set realistic timelines. Don't let the business drive the timeline. What you don't want to do is continually miss timelines because they're set unrealistically. Consider agile If you can do this in sprints at any degree, I think it's extremely helpful. And then this is real particular, but ensure the testing environment is real. I've run into a number of implementations where the store environment was different than the testing environment. And then when they actually went and did rollouts, it didn't work because the Wi-Fi wasn't right in the stores or whatever happens to me. So I think that's a critical element as well. That's great. And then the last piece is to ensure user adoption. And we've talked to a great deal about that, but you got to have the end user involved from the beginning. You need to employ just basic change management protocols, extensive communication, comprehensive training. And when I say training, it's not just technical training, it's behavioral training. Have clear adoption metrics and then have reporting and incentives that match those metrics so you know you're getting what you signed up for.
SPEAKER_01:That's great. And you know, you're right. We could do an entire program on that, John. I'm going to hold you to that because I want to come back to talk a lot about how do you actually implement the behavioral change inside the organization to ensure that once you've gone ahead and gotten to the point of having a piece of technology, how do you make sure that the organization coalesces around that and really gains the value? And I think that that's really a big part of what this podcast is always going to be about, is making sure that people get to that place between the white paper and reality, and they really get the value that they're looking for. John, it has been such a pleasure. I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming on the Thank you, Brian.
SPEAKER_00:I appreciate it. And to everyone listening, remember, it's all about that one-on-one relationship. So make sure it's a good
SPEAKER_01:one. Thank you. Take care. We'll be right back.