Are retailers falling short on their customer-centric strategies?

As the customer becomes king once again, could a customer-centric strategy be the way to win in 2017?

During Retail Week’s roundtable in collaboration with Adobe, retailers discussed the steps to becoming an experience led business in a bid to place the customer at the heart of their strategies, something they felt had been lost in the digital age.

The senior ecommerce manager at one electricals chain said: “It’s an evolution of mindset towards putting the customer in focus.”

Internal politics dominated the conversation, as all retailers were in agreement that structural changes needed to be made if businesses are to achieve a single view of the customer.

The customer experience manager from a top grocer added: “Fulfilment, ecommerce and customer service all need to come together, but there are a lot of politics involved in making changes there.”

The clicks and bricks conundrum

Becoming an experience led business may have moved beyond channel first to customer first, but retailers still struggle to unite clicks and bricks on some levels. As the ecommerce director of a luxury brand cited: “Connecting your CRM with your in-store is vital, particularly for luxury. Your best customers are the ones that shop on multiple channels.”

“We have provided stats to our retail staff to show how a multichannel customer is of greater value”

Fashion and lifestyle brand marketing manager

However, he added: “A lot of CRM focuses on customers’ value to us, but it should be the other way around.”

The marketing manager from a fashion and lifestyle brand explained that education was the most important tool to get ecommerce and retail staff singing from the same hymn sheet. “Online is doing so much better than stores for us, so we’re trying to share our learnings”

She added: “We have provided stats to our retail staff to show how a multichannel customer is of greater value and they don’t take sales away from stores. But until we see customer value in the KPIs, we’re not going to solve the multichannel conundrum.”

The power of knowledge

The first step towards a customer first strategy is discovering what shoppers want from your business.

“Consumers are highly intolerant to barriers. The more you put barriers up, the more you push consumers to competitors,” said a representative from a luxury brand.

“The big challenge for us as retailers is ensuring the end to end path is smooth. The strongest brands are the ones that have a mantra of eradicating complexity and know who they are and what they have to offer.”

“Same day is the big focus for us in terms of our delivery proposition, just trying to keep up with Amazon”

Technology chain ecommerce manager

The grocery customer experience manager agreed: “The most important part is getting an effortless experience, from discovery to purchase.”

For other retailers, developing their delivery proposition is the only way to keep up with consumer needs, which are being driven by a particular internet giant.

“Same day is the big focus for us in terms of our delivery proposition, just trying to keep up with Amazon,” said the electricals chain ecommerce manager.

Adobe head of product and industry marketing Vijay Gupta added: “It’s one thing to talk about Amazon as a market leader, but it has a luxury that many of us don’t – that it’s ok to run a business at a loss for so long. We would have a problem encouraging stakeholders to buy into that.”

The room was in agreement that a customer-first strategy is a top priority for the year ahead.

A representative from a pureplay retailer summed up the sentiment by stating: “We’ve become lost in the four walls of code and we’ve lost sight of what the customer wants. We need to get back to that.”