10 Clienteling Best Practice - Pre-Implementation - Part 1 of 3

Clienteling Best Practice Series:
    Part 1 - Pre-Implementation
    Part 2 - Implementation & Go-Live
    Part 3 - Engagement and Selling

In this episode of The Clienteling Podcast, Bryan Amaral highlights those topics that must be considered prior to implementation of a successful Clienteling project.


1. Vision, Alignment and Baseline Metrics:

• A thoughtful approach with a disciplined methodology
• What is the Vision for your brand? What are your goals?
• What types of engagement and journeys?
• How and when do you customers want to engage? 
• What types of engagement are possible for your brand?
• What is the role for your associates? 
• What does clienteling success look like for all stakeholders 
• Analyze Data. What does it tell us about relationships & behavior? 
• What winning practices can be replicated at scale 
• What can be measured and what ROI could be expected?

2. Assess Current & Desired Behaviors:

• Interview store teams and analyze customer engagement at every touchpoint. 
• How are associates engaging? Labor & staff/customer ratio?
• What are the “hero” outcomes? What are the failure points? 
• Do you monetize store events? Are associates reaching out? Scheduling appointments?  Engaging in specific dialogues? Capturing information and contact preference? Identifying the next best action? 
• Do your associates have adequate product knowledge & customer info? Have you identified archetypes?
• How do your customers use mobile today? 
• Where is there friction? What’s missing? 
• What are customers unhappy about? 

3. Assess Training and Change Management

• Do you currently have a sales methodology? If so, how will clienteling fit into that? What can clienteling do to enhance it?
• How are sales skills trained, monitored and managed?
• Will you identify store-level solution champions?  
• Who will do the solution training? Who trains the trainers? 
• How will your Sales Associates, SM’s, DM’s be incentivized to use the solution? Programs and contests?
• How will adoption be monitored and managed? 

4. Marketing, Ecommerce & BI Alignment

• Who owns the customer experience? How does each functional area of the business collaborate to leverage customer data to create the CX?
• How will Marketing and Ecommerce initiatives be executed at the store level? 
• How will “store to customer” digital transactions be attributed? Will store associates get credit for online sales?
• What customer and associate data attributes need to be shared across all constituents?  
• What data insights will be used to drive personalization and communication from clienteling?

5. Pre-Implementation Checklist

1. Baseline Data Analysis and Existing Relationship Practice Insights
2. Document Desired Sales and Omni-channel Engagement Practices
3. Define Roles and Linkage Between Marketing, Ecomm and Store Execution
4. Document Strategy for Training and Change Management Approach
5. Pro-forma Business Impact Model Yielding ROI/IRR from Desired Behaviors

Resources:

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 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

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. Hello, and welcome back to the Clienteling Podcast. Today's program is going to be the first of a three-part series that relates to clienteling best practices. We're going to be talking about those issues that any retailer should be considering when they're implementing a project, those issues that they should be considering as they actually go live with the project, and of course, getting people to gain the most value from that project. So we'll break it up into three different shows. And today we'll start with the pre-implementation considerations that any retailer should be thinking about as they pursue a clienteling initiative. So as I think about pre-implementation, really the first bucket of questions falls into an area that I call vision alignment in baseline metrics. And I'll break that down a little bit for you here, but it starts with a very thoughtful approach around what is it we're trying to accomplish, really thinking with the end in mind. And what is this disciplined methodology of how we're going to approach that? We get to get very clear around what the vision is for your brand. Okay, what is the messaging that you want? your salespeople to be bringing out to the market? How is that going to align with the rest of the messaging and sort of the brand identity that we have for that? And what are the overall goals that you're going to have for clienteling? How do you get very specific around what is it we're trying to accomplish here by implementing this project? I want to take a very deep dive into understanding the various ways that retailers engage with our brand. Where do they start the process of considering buying a product from the retailer? And does it start online? Does it start in store? What kind of discovery process? How much discovery is important? We want to really understand all those various sorts of journeys. We want to understand to what extent they rely on the consultative engagement that comes from high quality salespeople in a higher touch environment. We really want to understand all those various sorts of customer journeys. And we want to understand deeply how and when your customers want to engage. Are your customers starting that process in the off hours online? Is it more a matter that they tend to be more spontaneous in their engagement with your brand walking by your store? Is it that they really want that one-to-one personal help of a sales associate reaching out to them and kind of creating demand for what it is they might want next? So we want to really deeply understand how the customers want to engage around your brand. And then we want to talk about what types of engagements are possible for your brand. Not every retailer is going to quote, have permission, not every sales associate is going to have permission to engage with customers in the same way. Some products, some categories are better suited to higher touch sorts of selling engagements. And so we want to really kind of understand what types of engagement processes, what ways can we engage with our customers, both from a digital perspective, as well as a one-to-one selling perspective. And then in the store, what is possible around all of that and what's appropriate. And then we want to deep think about what is the role for our associates in these new customer journeys. So we want to get very, very specific around what are those behaviors that we're ultimately trying to drive before, during, and after every customer engagement. And then of course, the other area that we really want to consider is what does success really look like around a clienteling project for all the stakeholders? What is going to be the impact on store operations and sales? And there'll be an implication as it relates to product and kind of the merchant considerations. But we want to really look at, even from an IT perspective, what has to be true in order to make this work from an IT perspective. So what does clienteling success look like for all the various stakeholders that are in the business? So those are some of the kind of the deep vision questions that we're going to have. And we want to make sure, particularly in that last question about success for all stakeholders, that there's an alignment, there's a commonality, there's a common vision inside the organization around what it is we're trying to accomplish. Now, the other thing that we want to do do in this very first phase of consideration around a clienteling project is start to look at some baseline metrics, start to really analyze the data. And so what we generally suggest is that a retailer do a deep dive into their data and really look at existing relationships. Look at what are the ways that the retailer is engaging with customers today, sales associate relationships. What is the frequency of one-to-one customer engagement? One of the key things that we've seen in a lot of our projects is that the business impact of a customer going back to the same associate two, three, four times can be eight to 10 times the amount of sell-through that you would normally, or the sales volume that you would normally get from a more random kind of relationship. So once that relationship gets built between a sales associate and a customer, we can see an awful lot of impact. And of course, the idea here being that once we do that, we can then try to replicate those behaviors that may be happening You know, in an ad hoc sort of way or occasionally happening inside the organization or with a small number of customers, how do we actually scale that, make that happen in a much more of an enterprise sort of way? So we want to look at the data and understand what is it telling us about the relationships that exist today and about the behaviors of our sales associates today? And then how can we take that information that we're learning there and use that to shape what it is that we're trying to accomplish with our clienteling project? And so it comes down to what are the winning practices that they're doing? So once you understand those relationships, you then want to go back and talk to the people that are creating those relationships, people in your stores, and start to understand what is it they're really doing and how do we replicate that and make sure the technology that we're implementing is going to be able to allow more people to do that and allow the people that are doing that to do more of it. And then ultimately, we want to start to think in terms of building a business impact model. A business impact model is where we look at those behaviors and we look at what-if scenarios around all of those behaviors. And we look at what the financial impact might be on each of those behaviors as it relates to creating top-line revenue, increasing traffic, whatever the retail metrics might be. So traffic conversion on average transaction size are really what drives revenue. And then, of course, we have the consideration of margin. So we want to look at those behaviors and then try to understand if those behaviors were managed more effectively, if they happened with more frequency inside of our stores, then how would we ultimately see that reflected in the economics of the business? So we want to look very closely at the behaviors that we ultimately want to be driving. We want to correlate a value to those behaviors. And then we want to look at what the business impact would be against the ultimate cost a little further down the road in your project of what it's going to cost to implement this kind of transformation inside of your business from both technology and the people in process perspective. Okay. This brings us to the second bucket of consideration when we're talking about best practices around pre-implementation for clienteling. And that bucket is around assessing both the current and the desired behaviors that you'd like to see in your stores. So that starts with interviewing your store teams and really analyzing what do those customer engagement moments look like at every possible touch point in the organization. You want to really understand what is selling really look and feel like from a sales associate point of view. What are they learning? What are they capturing? What information would be useful for us to leverage that's typical in those engagements? So first part of it is really about going through a process of interviewing your store teams and really understanding what's happening at the store level. And by the way, I'm always very surprised in working with retail executives that often enough, there's a pretty big gap of understanding between what it really looks like on the store floor versus what their perspective of that is. And of course, it makes it difficult for them to really build strategies and implement solutions that are ultimately going to prove those workflows that they don't deeply understand. So this is a great first step is to do those deep store interviews and analyze every type of customer engagement, really hear from those people at the grassroots level what's happening at the store. So we want to understand how they're engaging. We want to understand why they're engaging. And we really want to understand how many customers are not being engaged. So there's a whole question that gets raised very early on in this process around the labor to customer ratio. Obviously, labor is one of the most expensive aspects of running a retail business. It's the biggest budget item. And we tend to see a lot of retailers try to cut back on labor. And in doing so, they've actually impacted the customer journeys. They've impacted the level of service they can provide provided in the store. And it's a delicate balance, right? It's something that these retailers are always trying to understand more deeply. If we start with the idea of what those practices are that we need to be driving and we know what kind of a cadence we'd like those things to be happening, you know, how often we want certain kinds of outreach or certain kinds of upsell or certain sorts of workflows that may be happening on the store floor. When we deeply understand those things and we understand how to correlate a value to each one of those for every time a happens, we can then correlate that back against the amount of labor that we need to have. And then we start to understand, how do we make sure that there are enough people in the store to really provide the level of experience that our customers are expecting? We then want to really understand from our salesperson's perspective, what are the hero outcomes? When are those moments where they really feel that they've created incremental value? We may want to talk to customers to understand what hero outcomes they've experienced when they've dealt with our brands. But we also want to know what are the failure points? When do people walk away unhappy? When do people walk away unable to find what it is they're looking for or feel as though the sales associate was unable to really solve their problem? So we want to deeply understand those things because that's going to become part of our overall strategy of how we're engaging customers and want to know how often that's happening. And we want to know what the ultimate impact on that is, because when we look at that business impact model that I was talking about before, we start to build the practices and we We want to understand both the positive outcomes and the negative outcomes because those are going to both have an economic correlation. So then the next area that we want to talk about in most retailers today, when they talk about creating experiences for the customers, a lot of that tends to be around store events. So are you creating store events? Are you able to monetize those store events? What's working? What's not? Why? Are the associates reaching out? Are they scheduling appointments? Are those associates really learning how to engage in a very specific dialogue. They've been trained to those kinds of dialogues in order to really engage with customers so that we monetize the story events in a very significant way. And then are they capturing information and contact preferences with every customer engagement? You know, what else are they doing? Are they identifying that next best action that may be happening or that should happen with a specific customer? Another area that you want to be thinking about is do your associates really have adequate product knowledge? And they have access to the kinds of customer information currently that could be valuable in terms of trying to create demand when the customer's in the store, in terms of really being able to drive that next best action with the customer. One of the things that I tell a lot of my clients to start to think about is identifying not just customer journeys, but identifying archetypes, understanding that there are certain kinds of customers that are likely to respond to certain kinds of one-to-one communications, offers, messaging of their customers. various sorts, and even building collections of apparel or of jewelry or whatever might be based on an archetype. So it's kind of important because all of this is going to come back into how we leverage a clienteling system long-term. Another area that I tell retailers to start to do research around is understanding how are their consumers using mobile in the store today? What is it they're using it for? Are they doing product lookup from a competitive standpoint or are They, you know, showrooming essentially is what we would call that. Are they using it to communicate directly with the store kind of from an inbound perspective to say, do you have this product available? I see it online, but do you really have it in the store? Can you put it aside for, you know, whatever it might be? But we really want to understand with empowered associates and empowered customers, how is technology being used today, even though it's not necessarily an enterprise class solution, how are they leveraging these technologies today in order to facilitate a better customer experience. We also want to understand where there's friction. Friction in the sales process. Friction can be happening at checkout. We've seen a lot of that, certainly. I was working with one retailer who was working very, very hard on creating these ideal workflows, and they had a whole series of ways that they were ensuring that when they would engage a customer in the fitting room, that they were able to really maximize those moments. They were doing a So many things. When somebody would come in to do a return from a buy online and return it to the store, how they were converting that customer, getting them back out into the store, looking at new product and getting them into the fitting room. They were doing all these things great. And then I'd look over at the POS terminal and there would be four people, five people standing in line because they were having huge problems with some of their store level technology, their credit card processing or whatever the case may be. And there was a lot of friction in that process. And I watched after all that great work, people literally dropping their potential purchases right there at the counter and walking out of the store. So we want to understand what these friction points are. We want to look at every one of those customer journeys. We want to get the sales associates to talk to us about where they're seeing friction in the process and where it's breaking down. What's missing and what can we do about that? And, you know, ultimately, I think what this really comes down to is the salespeople are the ones that really know what customers are happy about and what they're unhappy about. So we really want to understand From the sales associate perspective, what's happening in the store and how are we going to really wow our customers? The third area or perhaps the third bucket of pre-implementation consideration is what I like to call assessing your training needs and really looking at your change management requirements in order to make your project successful. So we have to start, as I've said before, with the end in mind. So what I often ask early on is, do you currently have a replicable sales methodology? Do you have a way that you're teaching people to sell inside of your environment? And if so, how is clienteling going to fit into that? So what can clienteling do perhaps to enhance that? It's a matter of really understanding what should be happening kind of as a sales dialogue, how people actually service their customers, and then how will clienteling work with that? Will we be capturing certain information at a certain point? Let's say at the very beginning of an interaction, will it be happening at the end of the interaction? What will we do with that information? Will we use clienteling as a way to look up purchase history and In order to make product recommendations in real time, we're working with the customer. All of those sorts of things are very, very important. But often enough, the higher touch environment, certainly there's a particular approach to selling for that particular business. And so what we want to understand is what that is. And then we'll look at a correlation between the current sales methodology and then how we can maximize that by leveraging tools that will allow that to happen, you know, with a higher level of efficacy, more frequent And perhaps at a higher level of performance in general. door level champions. So there's an entire process to thinking about how do we get those early wins with great salespeople that are able to set the standard and show everybody else the art of what is possible, particularly with a new piece of technology that may be brought into the equation. The other area is, you know, who's going to be doing the training? Is it a train the trainer kind of model? Are you going to be bringing in trainers? Those are all some considerations that you'll need to think about early on in the process. And how will your sales associates, sales managers, pardon me, sales managers, district managers be incentivized to use a solution. As part of an effective change management program is you're building a culture around a new clienteling implementation. It's often very helpful to create very specific programs that may even have contests and gamification tied into it as a way to get people to really leverage the tool and to be excited about it. And then, you know, ultimately we want to make sure that we're monitoring adoption and that we have a set of, of standards that we're going to expect from the people that we're bringing the technology to. So that's really kind of when we think about assessing training and change management, those are the key questions that you need to be thinking about in that particular area. And finally, the fourth area of best practices for clienteling from the standpoint of pre-implementation is really considering the role of marketing, e-commerce, and then what kind of BI alignment do we need to be thinking about as it relates to all of that from a business intelligence perspective? So the first question that is generally asked when we start to have this conversation is who owns the customer experience? How does each functional area of the business collaborate to leverage customer data to create that customer experience. In some businesses, store operations owns customers. In some businesses, it tends to be really a more of a marketing thing that they own the customer and they're responsible for it. But we have to understand how to create alignment around all of that and get people talking about how are we going to leverage data from the various parts of the business in order to create that customer experience. We want to understand how will marketing and commerce initiatives be executed at the store level. We're talking about omnichannel commerce. So marketing and e-commerce are really an entry point into a customer journey. So how is that going to be then shared at the store level in order to really be executed most effectively through clienteling sorts of behaviors and through an underlying technology infrastructure that supports that? When we start to talk about that, of course, then this whole question of attribution comes up. So how will that whole store-to-customer digital transaction be attributed, right? So someone comes into the store, they work with the sales associate, but then they go and buy it back online. There are some new technologies and there are several different strategies of how you can start to understand, get one view of the customer and understand their behaviors, both online and in-store. And be sure that if we need to give a sales associate credit for an online sale, that we have a means to do that. The next area of consideration really is, you know, what attributes from customer data and for that matter, and associate data need to be shared across all constituents. A very important part of a clienteling consideration is protecting certain data. Sometimes it's VIP data in very high touch environments. Who gets to see what? It could be a competitive environment and only certain information can be seen between one associate and the next. So it's a matter of understanding how are we going to manage data? How are we going to manage visibility of that data and making sure that the clienteling system is able to address those requirements and that our workflows and the way that we train our people, take all of that into consideration. And finally, we're going to be looking at many families of data. And from that data, we should be able to gain some incredible insights that ultimately can be used to drive personalization and various sorts of outbound communication from clienteling. So as part of this overall process, we're going to look at e-commerce data, marketing data, in-store clienteling data, transaction data. There's lots of different families of data that we're going to be able to bring back together. But how are we going to start to think Think about leveraging that in order to do personalized one-to-one communication, both from a human-to-human perspective, as well as from a digital-to-app perspective. How is that all going to come together? So that's all part of this fourth bucket from a pre-implementation perspective. Those are the things that we want to be thinking about. So in summary, there are really five items on your pre-implementation checklist that you need to be considering before you start your clienteling project. First, we want to do a baseline data analysis and look at those existing relationships and those practices that are likely happening in your stores today, gain some insight so we know what's working and what we want to try to replicate in terms of the practices we want to be driving inside of our store. We really want to go through a process of interviewing people and document those desired sales practices and those omni-channel engagement practices that are going to really align with the kinds of customer journeys that we have a vision for. We'd want to define role and the linkage between marketing, e-commerce, and store execution, making sure that we have a true omni-channel strategy for every touchpoint and that clienteling is supporting the in-store reaching beyond the store. We want to document the strategy for the training and change management, and we want to ultimately build out performer business impact models that are going to yield a very clear return on investment and internal rate of return on a project when our associates follow those design So that's the end of the pre-implementation phase of this three-part series. Listen to the next section in our next podcast. We'll be right back.