Customer Experience Transformation: The Winning Formula

CI&T recently brought together a visionary group of three retail leaders to share their insights and help retailers thrive in today’s fast-moving marketplaces. The discussion centered around a key theme:  What are the best ways to engage with today’s digital shoppers?   
 
For starters, everyone agrees that most of today’s digital shopping journeys skew toward either peak efficiency or high engagement. The rarest—but most successful—customer journeys are the ones that strike a delicate balance, delivering exceptional experiences that combine highly engaging content with unmatched shopping efficiency. And, despite the fact that the three retailers who shared their ideas come from very different industries, they find clear common ground when it comes to winning retail CX strategies. 

Keep it simple for the shopper

For Adam Crouch, GM International, at Poshmark, the leading online marketplace for new and secondhand fashions it’s all about simplicity, not only for the store’s 100 million shoppers (including 90 percent of American Millennial women) but also for its sellers, who rely on Poshmark to help them post, sell and ship easily. Crouch notes that one of the site’s most important breakthroughs was to negotiate with the U.S. Postal Service for flat-fee shipping, no matter the weight of the package. Though the USPS was reluctant to try something so revolutionary, Poshmark’s sellers needed this easier method to take the friction out of shipping. It’s a great example of a retailer looking beyond its own walls and out into its entire ecosystem to find ways to serve its customers better. It's this kind of “radical simplicity” that has allowed millions of people to become Poshmark microentrepreneurs.  

Less Clicks, More Engagement

All three retailers agree that it’s crucial to look constantly for ways to streamline engagement and shopping. Product development must always be oriented toward making things as simple as possible. As apps now do more of the work traditionally done by shopping websites, it’s a great moment for developers to take advantage of the app CX to distill the experience down to the minimal number of steps and button pushes.  

Understand your community through constant communication

Ekta Chopra, Chief Digital Officer at e.l.f. Cosmetics, obsesses about the e.l.f. community. Because the beauty sector cycles through trends at breakneck speeds, e.l.f. strives to tap into its community of six million users—especially its four million highly engaged loyalty customers—to mine useful insights. This “feet on the ground” phase is followed by a “head in the stars” phase, in which e.l.f. tries to spot where the community is going next. Finally, the team “moves at e.l.f. speed” to apply what it’s learned to get on top of the next trend before the next next one comes along.  
 
Poshmark’s Crouch calls its community experience, enjoyed by millions who share a mutual love of style and fashion, the company’s most effective retention tool by far. Poshmark goes out of its way to create ways for buyers and sellers to talk (and generate organic referral traffic from within), to help sellers livestream their own fashion shows, to host virtual themed style parties and to help shoppers replicate them in the real world, something that happened 450 times last year. It even has a team of Poshmark “ambassadors,” VIPs who are incentivized to pump up the community vibe.  
 
Francisco T. Bram, VP of Marketing and Customer Growth at grocery giant Albertsons Companies, notes that building a community and collecting insights and data from it has made a sound foundation for its Sincerely Health sub-brand customer experience, both in-person and digital. He taps into a panel of 14,000 shoppers to test out new ideas up to 32 times a year, and a smaller panel has guided the development of the Sincerely Health wellness initiative. “It’s part of our DNA to listen,” he says. When it comes to health, and personal health information, trust is crucial. The extremely simple app is HIPAA-compliant for data security and connects personal health metrics with useful information, health goals and incentives, pharmacy access and even telehealth visits. The result is private, rewarding and designed to delight. 

Use apps for great omnichannel experiences

CI&T’s Connected Retail Report 2023 found that 40 percent of consumers choose apps as their digital channel of preference. We’re at an inflection point. Bram notes that Albertson’s Sincerely Health is available only as an app, one designed to cover every touch point online, in the store and even on to the pharmacy and to a telehealth visit. The app delivers exclusive content and boosts the in-store shopping experience, delivering coupons and rewards to encourage loyalty. As a one-stop shop for both shopping and wellness, it’s now growing 30 percent year over year.  
 
As large retailers, both Poshmark and e.l.f. assumed for a while that they needed all the technological trappings of a website to sell efficiently, but their customers told them differently. Today, Poshmark’s seller power tools are still Web-based, but most customer use is on the app, and the retailer’s popular push notifications come from the app. Impulse shoppers love the chance to browse for a minute or two while they’re on the go, and Poshmark likes the notion that its logo is in plain view every time the phone lights up.  
 
In e.l.f.’s case, one million users rushed to download its app as soon as it was available, and today users spend more time there than on the Web site. It has proven to be powerful for community building as well, with its features putting an emphasis on communicating and sharing.  

Simplicity Community and Great Apps

The lessons are clear: simplicity, communication and app-based platforms can help ensure the best possible presence and engagement in all the various digital and real-world environments. As e.l.f.’s Chopra puts it, “CX is like a beautiful piece of music that you write. Every single note has to come together, and that’s when harmony happens. Every single touchpoint comes together in a nice cohesive story.”

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