Custom Tailored Fashion, Data Tailored Customer Experience

I want to expand upon my previous post regarding omnichannel fashion and retail by explaining how the customer journey and data in general, help to improve customer engagement thereby leading to improved customer relations, retention, unique user experiences and of course - the final goal: increases in sales.

It's becoming more and more clear to those in the fashion industry that while customers enjoy a well-tailored product, they love having a customer experience tailored to their unique lifestyle and personal desires.  This can only be achieved with data.

Data Drives Consistent Experiences

As the team identifies the ideal customer journey and defines how they would like to deliver this, it becomes clear that integrated data is the key  enabler when looking to realize consistent experiences at a company or brand level.

For Example...

Desired Objective: we want our Sales Staff to better serve their Customers by individualizing the experience in a consistent manner.  We will do this by providing each assistant with a handheld clienteling application which has not only past purchase information but information on how they are interacting with the Brand digitally, what they have looked at on the eCommerce site even if they didn’t buy anything, whether they have interacted with our Service Center etc., giving a complete view of their relationship with our Brand and their fashion preferences.

Impact of the above statement:

1. The Sales Staff need to have some kind of mobile device in hand.
2. The Sales Staff need some way of recognizing the customer.
3. Data needs to be presented in a highly effective graphical format which allows the Sales Staff to quickly understand insights.
4. Data from CRM, Digital and eCommerce channels needs to be combined with instore purchase data.
5. The system should provide the opportunity to support recommendations of next steps or actions to the sales staff.

New, innovative technologies are transforming marketing and sales for fashion retailers

The worlds of Digital and Fashion Retail are currently characterized by a plethora of niche technology solutions which are driving Customer Experience Change and can help to deliver truly omnichannel user experiences.  Some of these include:

• Digital Signage – the ability to control and transform the instore experience with the use of centralized video technology instead of traditional mannequins and instore merchandising.
• Identity Management – the ability to enhance the collection of customer data using Social login information and gathering insights from social integrated into your customer data.
• RFID Tagging – the ability to use tagging not only to track product movement for logistics purposes but to understand what any given customer could by trying on at any point in time.
• Wearable Technology – intelligent clothing to enable organizations to track usage and provide innovative experiences post purchase in Fashion.
• Mobile & Data Visualization – leveraging mobile heatmaps to understand how to plan and organize the shopfloor for maximum optimization.

Many of the more advanced Fashion Retailers are experimenting with these technologies but few are actually leveraging the full potential of these within a complete and integrated customer experience made possible by data integration.

We believe these technologies can have dramatic effects on the Sales success of Fashion Retail if used in an integrated way.  In my next blog, I will focus on this topic and the use of Digital Signage technology to drive Sales and personalize experiences.